Blacksmith, a startup dedicated to building a CI cloud from scratch, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding, according to a statement on Thursday. The company’s CI cloud is a hardware-software stack designed to deliver faster, cheaper, and more reliable compute for CI workloads. It’s now known as a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners: two times faster and half the cost.
The founders, Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru came up with this startup after seeing firsthand how painful and unpredictable managing CI infra could be on AWS, GCP, and Azure. CI jobs are short-lived, “bursty,” and need instant compute — a bad match for traditional cloud infrastructure.
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Self-hosting adds even more complexity, from slow VM (Virtual Machine) provisioning to overpriced storage that’s built for durability, not speed. Blacksmith aims to solve this problem by running its own fleet of bare-metal hardware, built with gaming CPUs for high single-core performance, optimized specifically for CI. Full control over the stack means faster builds, faster tests, and smarter caching.
Blacksmith sees CI needs stacked like Maslow’s hierarchy: fast compute at the base, observability tools to help developers merge code faster, and security to guard against supply chain attacks at the top. The company now powers CI for over 600 organizations, including Ashby, Finch, Clerk, Veed, and Mintlify.
The funding round was led by Erik Nordlander at Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator, along with prolific angel investors, including Spencer Kimball (CEO of Cockroach Labs), Peter Mattis (CTO of Cockroach Labs), Rich Aberman (Co-founder of WePay), JJ Fliegelman (Co-founder of WayUp), Eli Brown (Founder of Guilded) and Theo Browne (Founder of T3 Chat).
The founding team is made up of three engineers who hold previous work experience at Cockroach Labs, Faire, and Superblocks, with Shah and Maru having worked on the core database team at Cockroach. Headquartered in San Francisco, Blacksmith is part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch.
“Blacksmith is an easy win at any scale. Save money from day 1 and go faster. A rare technical product with no downside,” Ted Nyman, ex-CTO of GitHub, co-founder and CEO of Cased.