AI Code-Testing Startup Blacksmith Jumps to $550 Million Valuation With $45M Series B

Blacksmith, a San Francisco startup that runs continuous integration workloads on purpose-built hardware to validate AI-generated code, has raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners, TechCrunch reported on August 12. The round values the company at $550 million, up from the $60 million valuation assigned at its $10 million Series A less than a year ago — a nearly tenfold jump. Existing investors GV and Y Combinator also participated, bringing Blacksmith's total funding to $58.5 million.

Validation Becomes the Bottleneck

As AI makes coding dramatically faster, testing and validating all that code has emerged as the next bottleneck in software delivery. Blacksmith automates build and test pipelines on its own hardware, positioning itself between AI code generators and production. The round is part of a busy week for AI software tooling: AI code-review firm CodeRabbit closed a $143 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation the same day, and process-intelligence startup Skan AI raised a $63 million Series C, underscoring how venture money is flooding into the layer that checks the work AI writes.