Software testing platform Blacksmith raises $66 million and reaches $1 billion valuation

Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies build and test software more efficiently, announced on Wednesday, October 21, that it has raised $66 million in a Series C funding round led by the venture firm Sequoia. The deal values the company at $1 billion, making it a so-called unicorn. The platform is aimed at code of all kinds, including software written by artificial intelligence.

What the company does

Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company was founded to make continuous integration (CI) "less painful." CI is the process of building, testing, merging and validating code changes. In a blog post, he wrote that most companies are struggling to keep pace with the volume of CI they need to run, particularly now that so much code is written by AI.

He also said that as AI agents write more of the world's software, the key question is whether that software can be trusted.

Company figures

Blacksmith said its annual recurring revenue has grown 17-fold. It has run more than 90 million CI jobs, meaning individual automated code checks. Its customers include Mercury and Granola.

Rapid rise in valuation

The Series C arrives only two months after a $45 million Series B, when the company was valued at $550 million. A year ago, following a $10 million Series A, Blacksmith was valued at $60 million. In total, the company has raised $125 million to date.