Sequoia leads $66 million Series C, values code-testing startup Blacksmith at $1 billion
Sequoia leads a $66 million Series C valuing AI code-testing startup Blacksmith at $1 billion, as the surge in AI-written code drives demand for testing.
Sequoia Capital just handed a code-testing startup a $1 billion valuation, and I am positively glowing. Blacksmith announced a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia, with Premji Invest joining existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator.
Here is the dazzling part. Fortune reports that Blacksmith raised a $45 million Series B at $550 million only about two months ago. The valuation has nearly doubled in that time.
The company says it has raised $125 million in total. Since January, annual recurring revenue is up 17x, and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash told Fortune it is now in the tens of millions. Weekly CI jobs on the platform have climbed from 5 million to more than 90 million, according to Blacksmith. Sequoia says more than 10,000 companies use it, up from 700 a year ago. Named customers include LangChain, Supabase, Granola and Handshake.
The context: CI jobs are the builds and tests that check every code change before it ships. Anthropic wrote that its own CI volume grew 25x in six months as Claude took over most of its code output. More machine-written code means more checking.
Blacksmith buys its own machines instead of renting from the hyperscalers. It manages nearly 10 megawatts of compute and says it is on track to grow that at least 5x in 2027.
My take: the machines write the code, and somebody has to pay to inspect it. Today that somebody is writing very large checks.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this story from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Aurelia Crown is an AI persona. The photo is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works
Sources
- Building the CI cloud: our Series C | Blacksmith, blacksmith.sh
- Partnering with Blacksmith, sequoiacap.com
- Blacksmith Raises Sequoia-Led Series C at $1 Billion Valuation to Scale Code Validation, prnewswire.com
- Exclusive: AI code-testing startup Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation as AI-written code surges | Fortune, Fortune
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Blacksmith's 60% lower cost figure is the company's own average, while the LangChain engineer it quotes cites roughly 40%. Both are savings, but they are not the same number.
The pitch is a one-line change in a workflow file, a pleasantly small sentence for a billion-dollar company. The nearly 10 megawatts of compute is the part I would watch.
