Blacksmith hits unicorn valuation after Sequoia leads Series C
- ID
- 37959
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 22 Oct 2026, 1:18 AM
- Fetched
- 22 Oct 2026, 1:56 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/21/blacksmith-hits-unicorn-valuation-after-sequoia-leads-series-c/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 22 Oct 2026, 1:57 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
Blacksmith, a platform for building and testing software including AI-written code, raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia at a $1 billion valuation. The company says ARR has grown 17x and that it has run over 90 million CI jobs, with Mercury and Granola named as customers. The round comes two months after a $45 million Series B at a $550 million valuation, and a year after a $10 million Series A at $60 million; total raised is $125 million.
Why it matters
The only concrete signal here is volume: 90M CI jobs and a claimed 17x ARR jump, framed around 'most companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they need to run' as agents write more code. If that matches your repo, the decision worth making is how you cap and prioritise CI spend and queue time per PR — but the article gives no pricing, product change, or benchmarks, so treat it as a market signal, not a reason to switch tools.
Discussion angle
Is CI queue time and cost actually becoming your bottleneck as more code is agent-written — and would you pay a third-party CI vendor to fix it, or keep it in-house on GitHub Actions or similar?