AI Code Testing Startup Sees Ninefold Growth Over a Year

Blacksmith, a two-year old startup, just announced that they have secured $45M in a Series B round led by Peak XV Partners with participation from Google Ventures and Y Combinator. This brings their total funding to $58.5M at a $550M valuation (up from $60M last year).

1Why It's Growing So Fast

While AI powered coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Codex help write code faster, they also make it harder and more costly to validate that code is correct. That’s where Blacksmith comes in. They provide a cloud CI platform along with an AI assistant named Codesmith which helps identify and rectify errors before deployment.

In the last year, they went from having 700 to over 5,000 customers and their revenue grew over 10x. Some of their customers pay over $1M per year for their service. Their team expanded from 10 to 30 members during this time.

2A Signal for the Market

Code validation and testing is now the bottleneck in AI development. As AI generates more code, there’s an increasing need for robust methods to verify its correctness. Unlike other players such as GitHub Actions, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, Blacksmith is more specialized in this area.