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Blacksmith

Category: AI Developer Tools

Blacksmith is a continuous integration (CI) platform that speeds up GitHub Actions. Blacksmith was founded in 2024. The company is led by Aditya Jayaprakash. Based in San Francisco, USA. Team size: 16. Total funding raised: $13.5M. Latest round: Series A. Key investors include Google Ventures (GV), Y Combinator, Garry Tan, Thomas Dohmke.

Founded
2024
Headquarters
San Francisco, USA
Team size
16
Total funding
$13.5M

Value proposition

Run GitHub Actions up to 2x faster at half the cost, improving developer productivity and reducing CI/CD costs.

Products and solutions

["Fast CI for GitHub Actions","GitHub Actions Analytics","Logging platform for GitHub Actions","Support for Matrix Builds","Persistent Docker layer caching","Blacksmith Sandboxes (for coding agents)","Container Caching","Mac Runners (M4 Pro)"]

Unique value

A hardware-software stack purpose-built for CI, using high-performance gaming CPUs and NVMe drives to accelerate GitHub Actions.

Target customer

Mid-sized to large engineering teams using GitHub Actions for their CI/CD pipelines.

Industries served

["Technology","Software Development","AI/ML"]

Technology advantage

A vertically integrated solution that combines a custom hardware stack with a software platform optimized for CI, providing significant performance and cost advantages over standard GitHub Actions runners. Their analytics and logging features also offer superior visibility into CI/CD pipelines.

How they differentiate

Blacksmith differentiates by providing a high-performance CI cloud that significantly speeds up GitHub Actions. It focuses on eliminating build queues and accelerating various CI/CD tasks, such as caching and Docker image builds, to enhance developer productivity.

Main competitors

["Depot","Codefresh","Aviator","WarpBuild"]

Key partnerships

["Google Ventures","Y Combinator"]

Notable customers

["Ashby","Veed","Finch","Pylon","Plex","Supabase"]

Major milestones

["Accepted into and graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator program.","Successfully raised a $3.5M seed funding round.","Secured a $10M Series A funding round just four months after its seed round, indicating strong investor confidence and rapid early-stage growth."]

Growth metrics

Over 1,200 customers, nearing eight figures in revenue, 12x revenue growth in the past year, 30,000+ happy developers, 50M+ jobs processed monthly.

Market positioning

Blacksmith is positioned as a specialized solution for developers and organizations using GitHub Actions, particularly those in the AI and technology sectors that require faster and more efficient CI/CD pipelines. It aims to be the leading choice for high-performance, scalable CI infrastructure.

Geographic focus

Primarily targeting the North American market, but with a global reach given its remote-friendly operations and the nature of software development.

Patents and IP

Not publicly available

About Aditya Jayaprakash

Previously a founding engineer on the ads team at Faire (YC W17) where he worked on search infra and ads. He led retrieval and targeting and helped grow ads from 0 to $XM. Graduated from University of Waterloo (CS) with a Master's from University of Alberta (Theoretical CS research).

Official website: