# Blacksmith’s valuation surges nearly 10x in under a year > Source: > Published: 2026-08-12 11:13:01+00:00 Via getlago.com # Blacksmith’s valuation surges nearly 10x in under a year The developer tools startup went from an $18.84 million valuation to over $546 million in roughly 12 months, fueled by AI-driven demand for faster CI pipelines. A year ago, Blacksmith was a four-person team fresh out of Y Combinator with a simple pitch: run your continuous integration pipelines faster and cheaper than GitHub Actions. Today, the San Francisco startup sits at a post-money valuation of approximately $546 million, up from $18.84 million during its seed round in May 2025. That’s a roughly 29x valuation jump in about a year. Revenue tells a similar story: annual recurring revenue hit $3.5 million by September 2025, a tenfold increase from the $1 million figure earlier that same year. For a company that still has fewer than 10 employees, those numbers are hard to ignore. ## From seed to Series B in record time Blacksmith’s fundraising pace has been aggressive even by Silicon Valley standards. The company raised a $3.5 million seed round in May 2025, led by Google Ventures and Y Combinator. Four months later, it closed a $10 million Series A, again led by GV, in just 14 days. By May 2026, the company landed a $45 million Series B. The post-money valuation at that point reached $546.21 million, compared to $63 million after the Series A. To put that trajectory in perspective, the company’s valuation grew by more than 8.5x between the Series A close and the Series B close, a span of roughly eight months. ## Why CI infrastructure is suddenly a hot market Blacksmith’s core bet is that owning its own server hardware, rather than renting cloud compute, lets it deliver faster builds at lower cost while capturing better margins. Blacksmith has capitalized on this dynamic. The company now serves between 700 and 800 customers, including companies like Ashby, Finch, Clerk, Veed, and Mintlify. ## The team and the math Perhaps the most striking detail in Blacksmith’s story is the headcount. The team has grown from four to eight employees, with plans to double again soon. Running $3.5 million in ARR with eight people implies revenue per employee of roughly $437,500. **Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our [Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).