CI platform Blacksmith raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia at a $1 billion valuation, just two months after its Series B, as AI-generated code fuels demand for software build and validation tooling.
Blacksmith, a platform that lets companies build and test AI code more effectively, just announced a $66 million Series C round led by Sequoia that values the company at $1 billion.
# Blacksmith hits unicorn valuation after Sequoia leads Series C | TechCrunch
Source: [https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/21/blacksmith-hits-unicorn-valuation-after-sequoia-leads-series-c/](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/21/blacksmith-hits-unicorn-valuation-after-sequoia-leads-series-c/)
In Brief
Posted:
10:18 AM PDT · October 21, 2026
**Image Credits:**BlacksmithBlacksmith, a platform that helps companies more efficiently build and test software, including code written by AI,[announced Wednesday](https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/series-c)a[$66 million Series C](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blacksmith-raises-sequoia-led-series-c-at-1-billion-valuation-to-scale-code-validation-302915140.html)funding round led by Sequoia that values the company at $1 billion\.
In announcing the round, Blacksmith co\-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company was founded to make continuous integration \(CI\) — the process of building, testing, merging, and validating code changes —[“less painful\.”](https://x.com/adijayaprakash/status/2112891655997284512?s=46&t=NKnEkqPFyaLlaaccCJIV5A)In a blog post, he said that “most companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they need to run,” especially in an era where so much code is written by AI\.
“As agents write more of the world’s software, the question that matters is whether it can be trusted,” he added\.
The company also announced that its annual recurring revenue has grown 17x and that it has run over 90 million CI jobs, or individual automated code checks\. Customers include Mercury and Granola\.
The Series C[comes just two months](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/blacksmiths-valuation-jumps-10x-to-550m-as-ai-coding-fuels-software-validation/)after its $45 million Series B, which valued the company at $550 million\. A year ago, Blacksmith was valued at $60 million after raising a $10 million Series A\. It has raised $125 million to date\.
### Newsletters
Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news
## Related
## Latest in Venture
Blacksmith, an AI code-testing startup, raised $45M in Series B funding led by Peak XV Partners, valuing it at $550M—nearly 10x its valuation from less than a year ago—as AI-generated code fuels demand for software validation.
Indian AI coding startup Emergent raised $130M in Series C funding at a $1.5B valuation, becoming a unicorn just over a year after launch. The company targets small businesses and entrepreneurs with a production-grade AI coding platform, reaching $120M annual run-rate revenue.
Anthropic announces $65 billion Series H funding round at $965 billion post-money valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, to advance AI research and expand capacity for Claude.
SambaNova Systems raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in a Series F round led by General Atlantic, just five months after its $350 million Series E and SN50 chip launch, reflecting strong demand for enterprise AI inference infrastructure.
Supabase raised $150 million at a $10.65 billion valuation, with over 13 million developers using it as an app backend and 70% of new databases now created by agents or AI-driven tools.