Blacksmith, a high-performance CI cloud platform designed to compete with industry leaders like GitHub and AWS, has announced $3.5M in seed funding. The funding round was led by GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, with participation from angel investors including Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs; Peter Mattis, CTO of Cockroach Labs; and Rich Aberman, Co-Founder of WePay by J.P. Morgan.

Blacksmith aims to address the limitations of existing CI platforms, which often become bottlenecks, especially as AI transforms development workflows. The company's co-founder, Aayush, stated that their goal is to reinvent CI from first principles rather than forcing legacy technologies into an AI mold. Blacksmith distinguishes itself by being more than just a wrapper for AWS, GCP, or Azure. It's a hardware-software stack optimized specifically for CI, allowing it to make trade-offs that hyperscaler platforms cannot.

Blacksmith is currently working with over 600 organizations, including Ashby, Veed, Finch, Pylon, and Plex. The platform provides compute, storage, observability, and security for CI workloads in an AI-driven environment. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2024 by a team with experience in data distribution and disaster recovery systems at CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database used by companies like Comcast, JPMorgan, Netflix, and DoorDash. For more information, visit https://www.blacksmith.sh.