Blacksmith hits $1B valuation with $66M Sequoia round as CI demand 18x’d
Blacksmith closed a $66 million Series C on October 21, 2026, led by Sequoia Capital, at a $1 billion valuation. That unicorn threshold arrived in under two years from founding. Premji Invest joined as a new backer alongside returning investors Peak XV Partners, GV, and Y Combinator, bringing total funding to $125 million.
The Number That Explains the Round
Blacksmith runs faster GitHub Actions runners using AMD Ryzen 7950X processors, local NVMe storage, and Firecracker microVMs instead of the server-grade chips and network-attached storage GitHub’s hosted runners rely on. The company claims jobs complete twice as fast at up to 60 percent lower cost. LangChain’s infrastructure engineer Joaquin Borggio reported roughly 40 percent savings in production.
What drove the valuation jump: CI job volume on Blacksmith grew from 5 million per week in January 2026 to more than 90 million per week by October, an 18-fold increase in under ten months. Annual recurring revenue grew 17 times in the same period. Two months before this round, the Series B pegged the valuation at $550 million. The new round doubled it.
Why AI Agents Are the Cause
A human developer submits a pull request and waits. An AI coding agent runs a loop: submit code, read CI output, diagnose the failure, amend, resubmit. That loop runs 10 to 20 times per task. Each iteration triggers a full CI run. Anthropic’s own internal CI infrastructure grew 25-fold in the six months after Claude Code launched in March 2026, according to a disclosure Blacksmith cited in its Series C announcement.
GitHub’s published data shows AI-agent-opened pull requests on the platform grew from approximately 4 million in September 2025 to more than 17 million in March 2026. Weekly compute minutes on GitHub Actions grew from 500 million in 2023 to 2.1 billion in a single week in 2026.
Where the $66M Goes
Blacksmith currently manages just under 10 megawatts of compute across US and European data centers. The new capital funds a fivefold expansion to 50 megawatts by 2027, plus engineering and go-to-market growth in New York and San Francisco. The company now serves more than 10,000 customers including Mercury, LangChain, Supabase, Clerk, and Handshake, up from roughly 800 at the Series A in September 2025.
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