Blacksmith - Seed Round
$3.5M Raised
There’s a fine line between disruption and delusion in tech, most claim they’re changing the game when they barely know the rules. Then there’s Blacksmith, a team that didn’t just walk into the room, they built the furnace and fired up the forge.
Founded in 2024 by three Waterloo-bred systems engineers, Aditya Jayaprakash (ex-Faire), Aditya Maru, and Aayush Shah (both ex-Cockroach Labs), Blacksmith didn’t show up to tweak the system. They came to melt it down and recast it. And in less than a year, they’ve done just that, hammering out $1M in ARR with a team of four, while orchestrating millions of CI jobs a month over their own bare-metal hardware. No borrowed cloud. No bloated abstraction. Just raw, relentless performance.
What they’re building isn’t a tweak on CI, it’s a weapon. A purpose-built, high-performance CI cloud tuned for GitHub Actions and supercharged by high-end gaming CPUs. And it’s fast, up to 2x faster than the big cloud vendors. Cheaper too. And if that doesn’t get your Dev Ops lead’s heart rate up, check their pulse.
CI workloads are notoriously noisy, brittle, and expensive. You patch, they break. You scale, costs explode. Blacksmith didn’t optimize around the edges, they attacked the core. Local NV Mestorage. Firecracker VMs. Warm caches. No fluff. No over-engineered nonsense. Just a ruthless focus on what dev teams actually need: speed, reliability, and costs that don’t feel like a hostage negotiation.
And the market noticed. Over 600 orgs are already in the forge, names like Ashby, VEED.IO, Finch, AtoB, Pylon, Superblocks, Plex, by Rockwell Automation, and Slope. Not bad for a team that just stepped out of stealth.
Today they’re announcing a $3.5M seed round backed by GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, with individual firepower from Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis (the minds behind Cockroach Labs) and Richard Aberman (co-founder of WePay). That kind of cap table doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when founders show up with results, not promises.
Blacksmith’s not selling dreams, they’re delivering speed. They’re betting that the future of CI won’t live on generic hyperscalers, but on infrastructure forged with precision for the builders who need it most. And they’re not wrong.
Let’s connect and keep the momentum going across the tech ecosystem. Whether you’re a founder shaping the future, a leader driving change, a VC backing bold ideas, or an investor spotting the next big thing—together, we’re pushing boundaries. Proud to be building the future with you.
Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter (X), and keep the conversation going.