The equation for modern development is stark: if an AI agent can write code 100 times faster than a human, that speed gain is lost if compiling and testing that change still takes an hour. This reality has shifted the software development bottleneck to Continuous Integration (CI). This tension is the core thesis driving Blacksmith, and their solution wasn’t just optimization, it was a redesign from first principles.
When I met the co-founders of Blacksmith - Aditya Maru, Aditya Jayaprakash, and Aayush Shah - I was compelled by their founding insight: a cloud platform whose stack was designed from the ground up for CI could achieve better performance and economics than running these jobs on generic hyperscalers. This technical achievement and the demonstrated success with thousands of developers are why we were thrilled to partner with Blacksmith at the seed stage. Now, we’re proud to double down and lead their Series A.
Blacksmith Co-founder and CTO Aayush Shah and I recently sat down to discuss the technical journey that led them to this point, and how they are building a specialized cloud provider that is powering the next generation of software demands. Here are a few key takeaways from our conversation:
Blacksmith’s architectural choice is one of their boldest moves. They’re building their own fleet of bare metal machines instead of relying entirely on a cloud hyperscaler like AWS. Aayush explained how it’s a necessity driven by the unique shape of a CI workload: intense, sudden bursts of high demand for instant compute power. He detailed how Blacksmith is intentionally engineered to handle this real-time provisioning to achieve higher efficiency, by balancing the I/O workload to optimize for speed.
Furthermore, security when running untrusted workloads is paramount. Blacksmith’s use of micro VMs for job isolation is a brilliant example of combining modern low-overhead technology with maximum security, providing each job with its own isolated kernel. With this new round of funding, the Blacksmith team is focusing on expanding the surface area of their product. They are creating a powerful set of CI observability features, including their logging platform and new test analytics offering. The goal is to further compress the time between opening PRs and merging them.
Their new product allows teams to address one of the most annoying problems in modern development: flaky tests. As Aayush noted, even a small flakiness rate can render an entire test suite effectively unusable at scale. Providing the tools to identify and fix these issues is another step in accelerating developer productivity.
Throughout our conversation, it was clear that Blacksmith is rethinking infrastructure for the modern, AI-driven engineer. We are thrilled to continue our partnership with the Blacksmith team as they continue to build the future of developer infrastructure.