Blacksmith, a San Francisco-based provider of high-performance GitHub Actions runners, has raised $45 million in Series B funding led by Peak XV Partners. The company offers a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions that runs CI/CD up to 2x faster at 60-75% lower cost by switching a single line in workflow files. The capital will fund expansion of its bare-metal infrastructure to handle surging demand from AI-generated code.
AI Codegen Fuels CI Migration
The timing aligns with GitHub's $0.002 per minute platform fee for self-hosted runners effective March 2026, which is pushing teams toward third-party alternatives. WarpBuild raised $2.0M in Seed funding in August 2021, while Ubicloud secured $16M in Seed funding in March 2024. Depot raised $4.1M in Seed funding in August 2024 plus $10M in Series A in March 2026. Blacksmith's bare-metal gaming CPUs and built-in observability differentiate it from these players by delivering faster cache and Docker performance without requiring infrastructure management.
GitHub Pricing Shifts Create Opportunity
GitHub's new fee structure and the shutdown of BuildJet in March 2026 are driving customers to seek faster, cheaper options. The CI/CD tools market stood at $5.73 billion in 2026. Companies using AI coding tools like Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code now generate far more code, making validation the primary bottleneck. Current GitHub-hosted runners cannot keep pace with this volume at acceptable cost or speed.
Bare-Metal Runners Deliver Measurable Gains
Blacksmith provisions microVMs on bare metal gaming CPUs with co-located NVMe caching, achieving 4x faster cache downloads and 40x faster Docker builds. Its console provides test analytics, global log search, and automated PR comments that GitHub does not offer. Customers report concrete results: one reduced CI time by 82% and costs by 30%, while another achieved 65% cost savings with test suites dropping from 13 minutes to 6 minutes.
"Validating code is still a bottleneck, and it's an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more." — Aditya Jayaprakash, CEO
Peak XV Leads Growth Round
Peak XV Partners led the round, with existing investors GV and Y Combinator participating at a $550 million valuation. Total funding now reaches $58.5 million. The investor mix signals conviction in infrastructure built specifically for agentic workloads rather than generic cloud VMs. The company plans to use proceeds for additional compute capacity as it expands beyond CI runners toward a broader cloud for code execution.
CI/CD Market Expands Amid Structural Shift
The CI/CD tools market is projected to grow at 8.99% CAGR through 2035, with the narrower CI tools segment expanding at 22.02% CAGR through 2034. Structural drivers include AI code generation accelerating test volume sevenfold for Blacksmith since early 2026, plus enterprise demand for observability and compliance features. Competitors such as Ubicloud emphasize open-source flexibility while Depot targets broader build acceleration; Blacksmith combines hardware performance with managed observability in a single platform.
Scaling Compute for Agentic Era
With deployments already serving over 6,000 organizations and processing millions of jobs daily, Blacksmith is hiring in New York and San Francisco while adding storage and infrastructure talent from Google, Datadog, and Cockroach Labs. The company explicitly states it is building a cloud for code execution to meet the volume of AI-generated changes that existing systems cannot validate at scale.