San Francisco startup Blacksmith, which runs the automated build-and-test step for software teams, announced a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital on Wednesday, Oct. 21, valuing it at $1 billion.

Why it matters: AI coding agents now write so much code that checking it has become the bottleneck, and investors are paying up for that. Blacksmith was valued at $550 million just two months ago, TechCrunch reported.

The numbers

  • Weekly jobs: from 5 million in January to more than 90 million, the company said.
  • Annual recurring revenue: up 17 times since January.
  • Customers: more than 10,000 companies, including Mercury, Granola, Handshake and LangChain.
  • Total raised: $125 million. Premji Invest joined existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator.

What the money is for

Blacksmith says it will hire and expand its computing capacity, which is just under 10 megawatts across U.S. and European data centers, at least fivefold in 2027.

"As agents write more of the world's software, the question that matters is whether it can be trusted," co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash wrote, TechCrunch reported.

Blacksmith was founded in 2024 by Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru.