Blacksmith Becomes a Unicorn on Sequoia-Led Series C
Two months after a $550 million Series B, the CI startup is valued at $1 billion; it says annual recurring revenue has grown 17-fold.
In short
Blacksmith closed a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia that values the continuous-integration platform at $1 billion.
At a glance
- Series C: $66 million, led by Sequoia, at a $1 billion valuation — reported October 21, 2026.
- Earlier rounds: $10 million Series A at $60 million, $45 million Series B at $550 million; total raised reported as $125 million.
- Usage: more than 90 million CI jobs run; annual recurring revenue up 17-fold, per the company.
- Named customers: Mercury and Granola. Co-founder and CEO: Aditya Jayaprakash.
- Context, different company: Estonia's Blackwall announced a $100 million Series C at $2.2 billion on October 20, 2026.
Blacksmith has closed a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia, a round that values the continuous-integration company at $1 billion and puts it formally in unicorn territory. TechCrunch reported the deal on October 21, 2026.
What Blacksmith actually sells
CI is the unglamorous waiting room of shipping software: each pull request kicks off a build and a test suite, and an engineer sits there watching it. Blacksmith runs that compute for teams rather than leaving their jobs queued behind their code host's default runners. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash frames the pressure as volume — many companies can no longer keep up with the number of CI runs they need, and AI coding assistants keep pushing that number higher. Mercury and Granola are the customers named in the report.
Three valuations inside about a year
The repricing is the story as much as the money. A $10 million Series A valued the company at $60 million roughly a year ago. A $45 million Series B, only two months back, put it at $550 million. The new round takes it to $1 billion — close to double, in eight weeks.
Total funding is given as $125 million. The three disclosed rounds come to $121 million, which implies an earlier seed the report does not break out.
Reading the growth number carefully
Two usage figures are on the record: more than 90 million CI jobs run, and annual recurring revenue up 17-fold. Neither anchors to a dollar amount. A 17x multiple off an undisclosed base can describe a large business or a small one, and the report does not state the window the growth was measured over, the headcount, or where the company is based. Those remain unverified here — open questions, not quiet zeroes.
The same week, a second infrastructure round
Blackwall, a separate company working on a separate problem, announced a $100 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation on October 20, 2026, led by AVP alongside Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. The Estonian firm filters web traffic inside hosting providers' infrastructure — bot mitigation, DDoS defense, and increasingly the traffic generated by autonomous AI agents — and reached unicorn status at €1 billion only in September 2026, according to tech.eu.
Put the two side by side and the pattern is about where the bill lands. Capital is flowing to the layer that absorbs what generative models produce: test load in one case, request load in the other.
FAQ
How much is Blacksmith worth after the Series C?
$1 billion. Its Series B two months earlier valued it at $550 million, and its Series A about a year ago at $60 million.
How much has Blacksmith raised in total?
The report gives $125 million. The individually disclosed rounds — $10 million, $45 million and $66 million — total $121 million, and the remainder is not itemized in the source.
Who uses Blacksmith and what for?
Engineering teams run their continuous-integration builds and tests on it. Mercury and Granola are named as customers, and the company says more than 90 million CI jobs have run on the platform.
