Ex-Cockroach Labs Engineers Raise $3.5M in Seed Funding to Build a High-Performance CI Cloud for the AI Age

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Blacksmith, the high-performance CI cloud designed to compete with industry goliaths like GitHub and AWS in an AI world, today announced $3.5M in seed funding led by GV (Google Ventures) and Y Combinator, with participation from notable angel investors including Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs; Peter Mattis, CTO of Cockroach Labs; and Rich Aberman, Co-Founder of WePay by J.P. Morgan.

“Existing CI platforms often act as a bottleneck rather than an accelerator. Blacksmith is tackling this head-on by rethinking CI from the ground up, delivering the performance necessary for companies to innovate rapidly, particularly as AI transforms development workflows,” said Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV.

In an AI world where agents and code generation tools exponentially increase the amount of code that exists, these existing CI challenges will only worsen, and companies—from startups to enterprises—will have to ditch old workarounds and adapt quickly.

“Instead of watching companies slow down as they awkwardly try to force legacy CI technologies into an AI mold, our goal is to reinvent from first principles,” said Aayush, Co-founder of Blacksmith.

What makes Blacksmith unique is that the platform isn’t just another AWS, GCP, or Azure wrapper (like GitHub); instead, it’s a hardware-software stack that makes numerous purpose-built optimizations for CI–trade-offs that hyperscaler platforms, which must support general workloads, cannot make.

Blacksmith is already working with over 600 organizations, including Ashby, Veed, Finch, Pylon, and Plex. Their technology has been critical in allowing their customers to unlock tremendous amounts of growth.

About Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a high-performance CI cloud designed from first principles to provide best-in-class compute, storage, observability, and security for CI workloads in an AI world. Blacksmith was built by a team behind the data distribution and disaster recovery systems in CockroachDB, the world’s most powerful and reliable distributed SQL database, which is used by some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Comcast, JPMorgan, Netflix, and DoorDash. The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2024. For more information, visit https://www.blacksmith.sh.

SOURCE Blacksmith

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