A startup called Blacksmith Software Inc. wants to eliminate the inefficiencies around building and testing new software releases after closing on $10 million in an early-stage funding funding.

Today’s Series A round was led by Google Ventures, which also backed the startup when it raised $3.5 million in seed funding in May, and saw participation from Cockroach Labs Inc. Chief Executive Spencer Kimball and Sentry co-founder David Cramer.

Blacksmith says it’s taking on the slow, costly and unpredictable nature of continuous integration, which is the name given by developers to the process of building and testing new software updates before they’re released in production. It was founded in January 2024 by veterans of Cockroach Labs and Faire Wholesale Inc., who know only too well how painful CI can be for development teams.

With developers continuously pushing out new code into repositories like GitHub and AWS CodeCommit, CI has become an almost never-ending process that involves spinning up hundreds of virtual machines and burning through hours of computing power just to be able to test code before it can be shipped. To help manage with testing and integration, developers typically use tools from cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. or Google Cloud, but these tend to be too slow and less predictable than what teams need.

At a time when artificial intelligence and AI agents are transforming the way enterprises work, new software releases need to be iterated faster than ever before for companies to remain competitive, yet CI’s inefficiencies often make ambitious development timelines impossible to meet. By making CI faster and more efficient, Blacksmith is turning that on its head.

Blacksmith, unlike other CI platforms that rent generic cloud servers from Amazon Web Services Inc. and the like, runs its service exclusively on high-performance graphics processing units, giving developers access to more compute while reducing costs by up to 75%. Moreover, it enables teams to migrate with just a single line of code, so they can ship new software releases in a matter of minutes.

Blacksmith co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said most developers just see CI as something that “gets in the way” of their work. “We built Blacksmith to remove that drag, deliver predictable speed and cost savings, and now, to give teams more insight into what’s really happening inside their pipelines,” he said. “This is even more important for teams that are using AI code gen tools and want to move quickly.”

Alongside its specialized servers for CI, Blacksmith provides comprehensive testing tools and analytics, as well as an observability platform that gives developers deeper insights into GitHub Actions, which is used by developers to automate software testing and deployment.

Blacksmith said its CI platform is aimed at companies with teams of 500 or more engineers, and it claims to have grown its customer base to more than 700, having added dozens since its seed funding round in May. It believes that part of the reason for this momentum is the rapid adoption of AI coding agents, which have made developers more productive than ever, leading to bottlenecks at the CI stage.

By using its own servers, Blacksmith says it benefits from improved profit margins, which is just as well because it’s now raking in $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue, up from just $1 million in February. At that time, it only had four employees on its books, but now it has eight, and plans to double that number by the end of the year.

Those new hires will help to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and enable Blacksmith to open new offices in San Francisco and New York City, while improving its observability stack for GitHub Actions.

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