Google Ventures doubles down on dev tools startup Blacksmith

Google Ventures leads $10 million round for Blacksmith.

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Google Ventures has taken the lead on a new $10 million Series A investment in the fast-moving continuous integration and delivery platform Blacksmith—just four months after investing in its $3.5 million seed.

The quick follow-on is yet another example of just how aggressively investors are backing tools that reduce build times and cloud costs at a time when AI-driven development is moving even faster to push more code changes into the world.

Why GV moved fast to back Blacksmith again so soon

The round closed in only two weeks—a rarity even in a hot developer tooling market. The previous time, GV had gambled on the market and team; this time it was performance data and customer traction. It has already signed up hundreds of paying customers since May, and it has proven itself capable not only of significantly reducing build times but also of cutting down related compute expenses—material results that have become all the more critical for enterprise buyers.

Increased commits, courtesy of AI coding agents and pair programmers, are shredding continuous integration pipelines. Studies like those popularized by the DORA program have long associated shorter feedback loops with elite engineering performance, and today’s large organizations are prioritizing pipeline speed as a key KPI. GV’s rapid follow-on acts as a bet that CI speed and predictability are board-level concerns.

What Blacksmith actually sells to developers today

Blacksmith offers a drop-in CI service alternative to GitHub Actions. Your team can retarget their workflows with a one-line configuration change.

The platform also provides test analytics and an observability roadmap designed to surface flaky tests, bottleneck jobs, and cost hotspots—insights that are notoriously difficult to glean using generic runners.

The founders—former University of Waterloo students who built distributed systems at startups like Faire and Cockroach Labs—developed the product around a simple promise: to provide developers with faster feedback without needing the capacity planning headaches associated with traditional cloud CI.

A hardware-first gamble to rein in CI costs

Unlike most CI providers, which rely on standard cloud instances to run builds, Blacksmith runs builds on high-frequency gaming-grade CPUs hosted on its own hardware. For typical test-heavy, single-threaded workloads (like you have in CI), higher CPU clock speed plus predictable I/O outweighs generic cloud VMs on both performance and price.

The company promises as much as 2x faster processing and up to 75% lower compute costs compared with standard setups.

And owning the hardware means better unit economics as utilization goes up—a key lever in a category where margins can be compressed by cloud overhead. For customers, the draw is predictable run times and a lower cloud bill without refactoring pipelines.

Early traction and who’s buying Blacksmith’s CI platform

Blacksmith tells CIO that it’s targeting organizations with a 500-plus engineering workforce—ones who feel the impact of each minute lost to pipelines. Prominent adopters among them are Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Devsisters, Mintlify, Pylon, Slope, Supabase, and VEED. The startup, which graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, has a team of 11 and is building observability capabilities on top of its core CI acceleration.

Specifically, the lineup of investors includes a number of operator-angels with deep dev tooling backgrounds, such as Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, and David Cramer, co-founder of Sentry—both of whom are steeped in the economics of running high-scale developer platforms.

Competitive context across CI/CD and cloud platforms

Cloud vendors sell you native CI/CD—AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure won’t stop pitching tightly integrated pipelines. At the same time, incumbents like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Buildkite continue to add features. Blacksmith’s plan isn’t to be these environments, but to fit into existing GitHub-centric workflows and win on speed, cost, and visibility.

That positioning is relevant as more enterprises standardize on GitHub for source control and automation. If Blacksmith can continue to be a low-friction swap for runners while delivering meaningful improvements, it could grow without imposing new process—that’s a crucial consideration in busy tooling stacks.

AI agents are altering pipeline math for CI teams

AI code assistants are increasing the scope of proposed changes, but they also bring new challenges on the testing front, from breaking unit tests to introducing non-deterministic diffs that can amplify build matrices. Teams are spending less on storage and networking and more on compute that gives way to shorter CI feedback loops. In that transition, hardware-accelerated runners with compelling analytics can become a standard line item for platform engineering teams.

What this round signals for Blacksmith and CI buyers

Doubling down so soon for GV suggests a belief that CI performance has migrated from back-office utility to strategic differentiator. The challenge for Blacksmith is simple: scale infrastructure, drive deeper on GitHub alignment, and make those early wins a repeatable enterprise motion. So long as it can keep demonstrating the two numbers that matter—minutes saved per build and dollars saved per month—the company will have successfully carved out a resilient niche in the AI era’s toolchain.