Blacksmith Raises $3.5M led by GV and Y Combinator to Build a High-Performance CI Cloud.

Blacksmith announced a $3.5 million seed round led by Google Ventures and Y Combinator, with participation from several technology founders and executives, to expand its continuous integration infrastructure platform. The company says it serves more than 600 organizations and provides a drop-in alternative to GitHub Actions runners that it claims is faster and less expensive. Founded by engineers with backgrounds at Cockroach Labs, Faire, and Superblocks, Blacksmith aims to build a specialized CI cloud combining compute, observability, and security for short-lived, highly variable workloads. It argues that self-hosting CI on major cloud platforms can require costly overprovisioning and involve slow VM provisioning and storage configurations ill-suited to ephemeral jobs, so it operates its own bare-metal fleet using high-single-core-performance consumer CPUs and local storage. The funding will support hiring and further development of a roadmap that begins with fast compute, adds tools to identify performance regressions and flaky tests, and ultimately seeks to improve software supply-chain security.

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