Blacksmith Secures $3.5 Million in Funding to Create a Revolutionary CI Cloud for the AI Era

Blacksmith's Groundbreaking Initiative in the CI Cloud Landscape

In a move anticipated to revolutionize the continuous integration (CI) landscape, Blacksmith has announced the successful closure of a $3.5 million seed funding round. This initiative was spearheaded by GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, with noteworthy participation from prominent angel investors such as Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, both executives from Cockroach Labs, alongside Rich Aberman, co-founder of WePay.

The traditional CI platforms have often become bottlenecks in the otherwise fast-paced landscape of software development. Blacksmith aims to change this narrative by reinventing the CI experience entirely, delivering enhanced performance tailored to the evolving needs of companies, especially as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape development workflows.

Erik Nordlander, a general partner at GV, expressed optimism about Blacksmith's potential, stating, "Existing CI platforms often act as a bottleneck rather than an accelerator. Blacksmith is tackling this head-on by rethinking CI from the ground up." The urgency for such transformation is accentuated by the rapid increase in coding demands ignited by AI, necessitating a departure from outdated workarounds and a swift adaptation to new technologies.

Revolutionizing Continuous Integration
Blacksmith's distinct value lies in its foundation on a hardware-software stack specifically designed for continuous integration. Unlike platforms that merely wrap existing cloud services like AWS or Azure, Blacksmith has etched out significant optimizations focused entirely on CI workloads. These optimizations address performance trade-offs that large-scale providers typically cannot accommodate due to their general-purpose frameworks.

Aayush, co-founder of Blacksmith, articulated the vision behind this groundbreaking project. "Instead of watching companies slow down as they awkwardly try to force legacy CI technologies into an AI mold, our goal is to reinvent from first principles," he stated, emphasizing the need for a fresh take on CI.

As of now, Blacksmith has already engaged with over 600 organizations across different sectors, including high-growth companies such as Ashby, Veed, Finch, Pylon, and Plex. The firm’s technology has proven to be pivotal in helping these customers unlock remarkable growth, hinting at the larger impact its CI platform is poised to have on the industry at large.

About Blacksmith
Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, Blacksmith positions itself as a pioneer in the CI cloud domain, offering unparalleled compute capabilities, storage solutions, observability, and security specifically tailored for CI workloads in an AI-centric environment. The company was founded by engineers from the team responsible for the robust data distribution and disaster recovery systems at CockroachDB, recognized globally for its reliability and performance. Major enterprises including Comcast, JPMorgan, Netflix, and DoorDash leverage CockroachDB, testifying to the expertise behind Blacksmith.

As the landscape continues to evolve, Blacksmith is set to challenge established players in the market like GitHub and AWS, promising to redefine the standards for CI workflows in an AI-dominated future.

For more information about Blacksmith and its innovative offerings, visit Blacksmith's official website.