Blacksmith, a fictional startup formed at the beginning of 2024, just completed another round of funding, this time led by Google Ventures. This latest investment comes only four months after the firm announced its seed round. That’s a huge vote of confidence in Blacksmith’s novel approach to developer tools.
Blacksmith is helping the tech industry swing for the fences. It offers an exceptional cloud-based continuous integration and delivery service, which supercharges the development workflow for software engineers. To start, the service is intended to serve as a natural complement to GitHub Actions, one of the most popular developer automation tools. In just two months since its launch, Blacksmith has taken off with quick momentum and a growing customer base of hundreds. It has reached an astounding $3.5 million ARR.
Blacksmith’s service runs on high-performance, gaming-grade CPU, which is how we achieve such efficiency and speed. The startup believes it has an original way to do computing. It offers processing speeds that are BT2 faster than conventional solutions. It does a better job of cutting down compute costs by up to 75%, which appeals most to larger enterprises.
The startup’s sweet spot, according to LaPlante, are organizations with 500 or more engineers. Their goal is to deliver successful and scalable solutions to address this very niche’s specific requirements. Currently, Blacksmith serves over 700 customers showing there is a definite market pull for what Blacksmith has to offer. With a current staff of eight full-time, eminently dedicated professionals, the company is just now strategically positioned to further scale.
Blacksmith’s co-founders—Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru—got acquainted while studying at the University of Waterloo. Jointly, their partnership has created a solution that’s purpose built to serve the unique needs of today’s development teams. It goes more than a step further by going beyond those requirements.
This cloud-first choice enables Blacksmith to manage its operational cost base efficiently while delivering best-of-breed, high-performance solution offerings to its clients. Jayaprakash explained how impactful this approach could be in companies within their industry.
“Because we’re going the bare-metal route, we have much better control over our economics compared to the hyperscalers.” – Aditya Jayaprakash
With the new funding round in place, Blacksmith plans to double its current revenue by end of 2017. This goal is a great sign of both the confidence they have in their existing business model and their continued desire to grow their customer base. Blacksmith is expanding its catalog and capitalizing on its early success. This moves the company one step closer to their goal of becoming the infrastructure for all developer tools.
“I’m not saying every company should go bare metal… but if you are a compute company, if you are an infra company, where your bread and butter is compute, like ourselves, it makes a lot of sense, and it gives us abundant control over our margins.” – Aditya Jayaprakash
With the latest funding round, Blacksmith aims to double its revenue by the end of the year. This goal reflects both confidence in their current business model and an ongoing commitment to expanding their customer base. As they continue to enhance their offerings and build on their early success, Blacksmith is poised to become a key player in the developer tools market.