Google Ventures doubles down on dev tool startup Blacksmith just 4 months after its seed round | TechCrunch

Abstraction: Bare-metal CI/CD startup Blacksmith raises $10M Series A for GitHub Actions acceleration

Key points:

• Blacksmith raised a $10M Series A led by Google Ventures just 4 months after GV-led $3.5M seed; round closed in 14 days based on demonstrated traction
• Runs CI/CD on gaming-grade bare-metal CPUs rather than rented cloud VMs: claims 2x faster processing and 75% lower compute costs vs. AWS/GCP/Azure; switching requires changing one line of code
• Revenue: $1M ARR in February 2025 (4 people) → $3.5M ARR by September 2025 (8 people) with 700+ customers; targets teams of 500+ engineers
• AI coding agent boom has expanded the CI market significantly; Blacksmith complements GitHub Actions with analytics and observability on top
• Founded January 2024; YC Winter 2024 batch; founders met at University of Waterloo and previously built distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs
• Customers include Ashby, Chroma, Clerk, Mintlify, Supabase, and VEED

Connections: Google Ventures · Github · Y Combinator · Blacksmith · Continuous Integration · Agentic Coding

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/google-ventures-doubles-down-on-dev-tool-startup-blacksmith-just-4-months-after-its-seed-round/