Today's pick
Blacksmith
A San Francisco CI platform that runs the build, test and merge pipelines behind modern software on purpose-built hardware, sold as a faster, cheaper drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners.
- Problem
- 6
- Traction
- 8
- Founders
- 7
- Market
- 8
- Novelty
- 5
Why today
Today's pick is Blacksmith, the San Francisco CI platform that hit a 1 billion dollar valuation on October 21, 2026 after Sequoia Capital led a 66 million dollar Series C, just two months after Peak XV Partners priced it at 550 million dollars in a Series B. The three Waterloo-educated founders, who previously built distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs, started the company with a 3.5 million dollar seed less than a year and a half ago and have since grown weekly CI jobs from 5 million to more than 90 million while annual recurring revenue rose 17 times, as customers like Mercury, Granola, Ashby and LangChain lean on it to keep AI-generated code from clogging their build pipelines. The same week produced a genuinely global spread of deals: Swiss robotics startup Enact Intelligence raised an unusually large 30 million dollar pre-seed backed by Mistral's Arthur Mensch and Yann LeCun, Oxford spinout QuantrolOx raised 12 million euros to automate quantum computer tuning, Portuguese drone maker Beyond Vision raised over 28 million euros as a NATO-registered supplier, and Santa Clara's Maxinsights raised a 30 million dollar seed paying people to wear cameras to generate robot training data. Blacksmith stands out because its growth curve, doubling its valuation twice within a year on hard usage metrics rather than hype, shows how fast infrastructure for the AI-coding era is being priced.
Problem
As AI coding assistants and agents write an increasing share of a codebase's commits, the continuous integration pipelines that build, test and merge that code have become the new bottleneck. Every automated check consumes compute, and teams that once ran a few hundred CI jobs a day now run thousands as AI agents open and revise pull requests far faster than humans did. GitHub Actions and similar built-in runners were designed for a world of human-paced commits, not this volume, leaving engineering teams waiting on slow, expensive pipelines precisely when AI tools are supposed to be accelerating software delivery.
Product
Blacksmith sells a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions' own runners: teams change one line of their workflow configuration to redirect CI jobs onto Blacksmith's infrastructure instead of GitHub's. The platform runs on high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs rather than generic cloud hardware, paired with a software stack purpose-built for continuous integration rather than general compute, and combines results from parallel test runs into a single searchable view. Blacksmith says the result is CI that runs roughly twice as fast at about 60 percent lower cost on average, letting teams keep pace with AI tools that generate code and pull requests far faster than humans can review and merge them.
Traction
Blacksmith's usage has scaled sharply alongside the rise of AI-written code: weekly CI jobs run on the platform grew from 5 million in January 2026 to more than 90 million by October, while annual recurring revenue grew 17 times over the same stretch. More than 10,000 companies now use the service, including Mercury, Granola, Ashby, Handshake and LangChain, and its largest customers each spend over 1 million dollars a year. That usage curve, rather than a single marquee customer, is what convinced Sequoia and returning backers Peak XV, Google Ventures and Y Combinator to price the company at 1 billion dollars just two months after its last round.
Team
Blacksmith was founded by CEO Aditya Jayaprakash alongside co-founders Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, who met as students at the University of Waterloo. All three previously built large-scale distributed systems at Faire and Cockroach Labs before starting Blacksmith, going through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and closing a 3.5 million dollar seed round, led by Google Ventures and Y Combinator with Cockroach Labs co-founders Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis as angels, in just 14 days. That engineering background in distributed, high-throughput systems lines up directly with the problem Blacksmith is now selling a fix for.
Funding
Sequoia Capital led Blacksmith's 66 million dollar Series C, announced October 21, 2026, at a 1 billion dollar valuation, with Premji Invest joining and existing investors Peak XV Partners, Google Ventures and Y Combinator returning. The round comes just two months after Peak XV led a 45 million dollar Series B that valued the company at 550 million dollars in August 2026, which itself followed a 10 million dollar Series A led by Google Ventures in September 2025 and the 3.5 million dollar seed in May 2025. Blacksmith has now raised roughly 125 million dollars in total, quadrupling its valuation in just over a year.
Competitors
Blacksmith competes most directly with GitHub Actions, the default CI runner for the majority of software teams and the platform it is explicitly built to replace with a one-line migration, as well as established CI providers like CircleCI. Its pitch is that purpose-built, gaming-grade hardware and a CI-specific software stack beat generic cloud compute on both speed and cost, a technical edge that is easier to demonstrate than to defend, since GitHub controls the default developer experience and CircleCI has over a decade of enterprise relationships. Blacksmith's bet is that the sheer growth in AI-generated code makes switching costs worth it for teams drowning in CI jobs.
VC lens
Would YC fund it? Yes, and it already did: Blacksmith is a Y Combinator alum that turned a 3.5 million dollar seed into a 1 billion dollar valuation in about a year and a half, exactly the kind of infrastructure land grab YC chases, though the price now reflects revenue multiples a seed-stage YC check would never pay.
Biggest risk: Blacksmith's business is a faster, cheaper wrapper around GitHub Actions and commodity CI workflows that a well-funded incumbent, including GitHub itself, could undercut by matching its pricing or hardware approach, and its growth is tied to how long the current flood of AI-written code keeps pipelines this congested.
Runners-up
Enact Intelligence
A Swiss pre-seed robotics startup building touch-and-force-sensing manipulation technology for industrial robots, which raised 30 million dollars backed by Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun and Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf. (Oct 22)
QuantrolOx
An Oxford University spinout building software that automates the tuning and control of quantum computers across hardware types, which raised a 12 million euro Series A led by IW Capital with the European Innovation Council Fund. (Oct 22)
Beyond Vision
A Portuguese maker of AI-powered unmanned aerial systems and a registered NATO supplier, which raised more than 28 million euros co-led by Indico Capital Partners and Lince Capital to scale production and global expansion. (Oct 22)
Maxinsights
A Santa Clara startup that pays people to wear cameras doing everyday tasks to build training data for robots, which raised a 30 million dollar seed led by Peak XV Partners. (Oct 23)
Archive
45 reports · click a row to open it| Date | Winner | One-liner | Runners-up | Open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-26 | Blacksmith | 66 million dollar Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a 1 billion dollar valuation, as the YC-backed CI platform's weekly jobs run grew from 5 million to over 90 million amid a flood of AI-written code | Enact Intelligence, QuantrolOx, Beyond Vision, Maxinsights | |
| 2026-10-25 | Flapping Airplanes | 1 billion dollar Series A at a 6 billion dollar valuation co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, as the year-old AI efficiency lab's valuation quadrupled nine months after its seed with still no shipped product | Air Space Intelligence, Whop, Arda Industries, AuxoAI | |
| 2026-10-24 | CureBay | 100 crore rupee Pre-Series C led by IvyCap Ventures, as the rural healthcare startup's network of technology enabled clinics and community health workers across seven Indian states passes 1.7 million patients served | Slingshot Insurance, Firstwork, Karta AI, Chapter Home | |
| 2026-10-23 | Warhound | 200 million dollar round at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation from In-Q-Tel, Sequoia and 8VC, as Colossal Biosciences founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey launch a company that genetically engineers and clones working dogs for the military and arms them with Anduril sensor gear | Enact, Beyond Vision, QuantrolOx, Indurex | |
| 2026-10-22 | Legora | 550 million dollar Series E at an 8.8 billion dollar valuation led by Atreides Management, as the legal AI company's annual recurring revenue doubled past 200 million dollars in six months while US in-house legal teams became its fastest-growing customer base | Pigment, Opply, Photon Bridge, Blacksmith | |
| 2026-10-21 | Daytona | 60 million dollar Series B at a 1 billion dollar valuation led by FirstMark, as the AI agent sandbox company's revenue run rate rose twenty-five fold in nine months on a customer list including Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition and Meta | Blackwall, Vessla, Linkener, Coherence Quantum | |
| 2026-10-20 | Tenstorrent | 1.5 billion dollar round at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its 2024 mark, as chip architect Jim Keller's inference-chip startup turns down Intel and Qualcomm buyout interest to keep challenging Nvidia independently | Town, Hunar.AI, Rabot Energy, Otter Health | |
| 2026-10-19 | Modal Labs | 750 million dollar Series D led by Accel at a 15.75 billion dollar valuation, as the AI infrastructure startup says its annualized run rate crossed 1 billion dollars with usage tripling in five months, built on serverless GPU access for inference, training and agent sandboxes | OMass Therapeutics, Scanntech, North.cloud, Fortem Technologies | |
| 2026-10-18 | Mueon | 65 million dollar Series A led by Maverick Silicon, as the Portland semiconductor startup founded by two Intel veterans scales Cubelets, modular 3D blocks bundling compute, memory, power and cooling to cut AI data center power and density limits, already in use by AI chip startup d-Matrix | Estuary Biotherapeutics, Fission, Otter Health, HyLight | |
| 2026-10-17 | Chariot Claims | 10 million dollar Series A led by Silverton Partners, as the rebranded ClaimClam legal-tech platform scales automated matching of consumers to mass arbitration and class-action claims over hidden fees and hard-to-cancel subscriptions, building on more than 65,000 claims already processed toward an estimated 92 million dollars in settlements | Marklo, Siena, Rein Security, Peppermint | |
| 2026-10-16 | Salience Labs | 125 million dollar oversubscribed Series B led by Bullhound Capital, as the Oxford-spun-out photonics company wins new backing from AMD Ventures and Intel Capital for all-optical circuit switches meant to break the power and latency ceiling facing electronic switches as AI GPU clusters scale toward tens of thousands of chips | Navra, Type One Energy, Oratomic, Gallatin AI | |
| 2026-10-15 | Soufflé Therapeutics | 135 million dollar Series B led by Juvia Group, as the MIT bioengineer Robert Langer-founded biotech works to deliver RNA medicines to muscle and heart tissue, a problem that has stalled the entire siRNA drug class, backed by more than 3.5 billion dollars in big pharma partnerships before any program has reached the clinic | ICON, Pluto Security, Nous Research, Atomic Machines | |
| 2026-10-14 | Vitalize | 31 million dollar Series A led by Oak HC and FT, as the Y Combinator-backed startup unifying hospital staffing, scheduling, patient flow and capacity management expands after enterprise customers reported cutting manual scheduling work and premium labor spend | Gallatin AI, byteXL, Desible.ai, Credfix | |
| 2026-10-13 | Universal Quantum | 100 million dollar Series A co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, a record raise for a UK quantum computing company, as the University of Sussex spinout races to prove its modular trapped-ion chiplet interconnect can out-scale newly public rivals Quantinuum and IonQ | Atlas Atomics, Type One Energy, Sabi, Catalyst | |
| 2026-10-12 | Manus | 500 million dollar funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, the general AI agent's first raise since China blocked Meta's 2 billion dollar bid for the company and barred its founders from leaving the country, as Manus pursues a reported 4 billion dollar valuation on roughly 125 million dollars of annualized revenue | Oratomic, Matchpoint Therapeutics, Oxide Computer, Stuut | |
| 2026-10-11 | Arena | 200 million dollar Series B co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures at a 3.1 billion dollar valuation, as the company behind the Chatbot Arena leaderboard nearly doubles its valuation in ten months on roughly 100 million dollars of annualized revenue from selling AI evaluation and alignment benchmarking to labs and enterprises, while Scale AI's new Seal Showdown contests its neutral-referee position | Gallatin AI, Rein Security, Rivercell, TeddyHoldings.AI | |
| 2026-10-10 | Multiply Labs | 75 million dollar Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks with new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures, as the decade-old biologics-manufacturing robotics company passes 100 million dollars raised on the strength of its first commercial sale, an up to 85 million dollar deal with Retro Biosciences, while competing against well-funded rivals Cellares and Ori Biotech to automate cell and gene therapy production | Zomint, Parakeet Health, OuterSignal, Efficient Computer | |
| 2026-10-09 | RougeTx | 58 million dollar Series A led by BioGeneration Ventures and Angelini Ventures with the European Investment Bank's Aurea facility and Kurma Partners also investing, as the Leiden University Medical Center spinout launches the first disease-modifying candidate for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, a bleeding disorder with no approved therapies, built on more than two decades of pericyte research | GMI Cloud, Varda Space Industries, doxx.net, Beyond Appliances | |
| 2026-10-08 | General Medicine | 120 million dollar Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz with Eli Lilly and Mercy Health joining, as the PillPack founders' online healthcare marketplace brings total funding to 152 million dollars less than three years after launch on hundreds of thousands of customers and an 80 Net Promoter Score | Noah, Nous Research, Buntar Aerospace, Monid | |
| 2026-10-07 | Vinci | 250 million dollar Series B at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora Innovation, as the Palo Alto physics foundation model startup jumps from a 46 million dollar seed and Series A disclosed last December to a tenfold valuation leap less than a year later, aiming its technology at chip design incumbents Cadence and Synopsys | Spiko, Hadrian, WhiteLab Genomics, Inbolt | |
| 2026-10-06 | Pandektes | 13.5 million euro Series A led by Munich's Alstin Capital, as the Copenhagen legal-research startup grows revenue sixfold and wins customers switching off LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck and Karnov with an API-first legal data platform | OneByZero, Fleuret AI, Laki Power, RobCo | |
| 2026-10-05 | PaleBlueDot AI | 200 million dollar Series C at a 3.2 billion dollar valuation led by ComputeCore, as the Palo Alto AI compute platform nearly triples its valuation in under nine months on more than 5 billion dollars of signed customer contracts | Simple Energy, Elio Mortgage, Menos AI, SedMed | |
| 2026-10-04 | Flow Engineering | 50 million dollar Series B at a 750 million dollar valuation co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management, as the AI-native systems-engineering platform for hardware teams grows to over 100 million requirements managed and adds General Motors, Anduril and Intuitive Machines as customers less than a year after its Series A | Miter, Kanu AI, Beltic, Satlyt | |
| 2026-10-03 | EliseAI | 350 million dollar round at a 4 billion dollar valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, as the housing and healthcare conversational AI company nearly doubles its valuation in thirteen months on 200 million dollars of ARR and five straight years of 100 percent revenue growth | Kahua, Breye Therapeutics, Amara, Kuro | |
| 2026-10-02 | Armadin | 255.5 million dollar Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, as Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia's agentic attacker-swarm security platform runs live attack campaigns for Fortune 500 and government customers seven months after stealth | Foundational, Seeds Fincap, Numeral, Chamelio | |
| 2026-10-01 | General Intuition | 220 million dollar Series B at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, nearly tripling in three months, as the AI foundation model startup trains action models on billions of gameplay clips from its own sister company Medal | Varda, Jeeves, Sand.ai, Arivihan | |
| 2026-09-30 | Tiny Health | Oversubscribed $33M Series B led by B Capital as the at-home microbiome testing company posts 1,624% three-year revenue growth and quadruples its practitioner-facing business | Modulate, erad, Baselayer, Ande | |
| 2026-09-29 | Instinct | $1B Series C led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10B valuation, a roughly 4x jump in five weeks, as its text-message AI agent passes 100,000 users with 10% daily compounding growth | SiMa.ai, Quartermaster, Outmarket AI, Humanos | |
| 2026-09-28 | Solcoa Industries | $75M seed ($45M equity led by Bain Capital Ventures plus $30M JPMorgan-anchored debt) to build a 500-tonne Nevada plant using a novel rare-earth metalmaking process, aimed at breaking China's 95% grip on metallization | Clastix, Prevision Medicine, Spiich, Barq | |
| 2026-09-27 | Ultraviolette | $85M Series E led by Yali Capital and TDK Ventures; Bengaluru performance EV motorcycle maker plans US entry by 2027 on 4-5x revenue growth | Micro1, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Dextr AI | |
| 2026-09-26 | Island | $400M Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4B valuation, more than doubling its 2024 valuation as the enterprise browser expands into governing AI agents | Cyera, Confido, Heidi Health, Firecrawl | |
| 2026-09-25 | Ema | $77M Series B led by Creaegis, more than quadrupling its valuation as every existing backer doubled down and Wipro scales its AI Employees to 240,000+ workers | Ando, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Nuvah | |
| 2026-09-24 | TEKEVER | $580M Series D led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford; Ukraine-proven AI surveillance drone maker hits $6.4B valuation on a new 400M pound UK Army contract | Enveda Biosciences, Basecamp Research, Numeral, Brahma AI | |
| 2026-09-23 | Verda | $189M oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital; profitable Nordic GPU cloud crosses $1B valuation on $165M ARR | Snorkel AI, Nexstrom, MacroCycle, Demoverse | |
| 2026-09-22 | BCI-Sonics | RMB 200M (~$30M) Pre-Series A led by HSG and Yunqi Capital; non-invasive ultrasound brain-computer interface racing China's invasive BCI leaders and OpenAI-backed Merge Labs | Spott, HighLife, CellPoint, Benford | |
| 2026-09-22 | Amber Electric | €49M Series E led by Morgan Stanley's 1GT; automates 50%+ of Australia's home batteries, expanding VPP software into Europe via E.ON | Corridor, Paymob, Unit1 Studio, Drivn | |
| 2026-09-18 | TypeSafe AI | $40M seed led by DCVC; "System One" model returns typed decisions for software, not chat — built by RLHF co-inventor Diogo Almeida | Space Epoch, Facilo, Treble Technologies, DheyaTech | |
| 2026-09-17 | Exein | $270M Series C at $1.7B valuation (30x in 2 yrs); kernel-level security layer for robots, drones and autonomous machines | Anew Labs, Delos Data, CADDi, AIUC | |
| 2026-09-16 | Euclyd | €200M+ Series A; Samsung-backed (investor + manufacturer) AI inference chip built to out-efficiency Nvidia, chaired by ex-ASML CEO | Profound, Flam, ENCOS, Nutshell Therapeutics | |
| 2026-09-15 | Fortaegis | $50M oversubscribed Series A; quantum-safe security rooted in silicon, chaired by Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan | Qupital, Tandem Health, Atomarine, UniqYou | |
| 2026-09-11 | Positron AI | $875M Series C at $5B valuation; memory-first inference chips challenging Nvidia's HBM lock-in | The Boring Company, Mach Industries, Rogo Technologies, Swish | |
| 2026-09-10 | Cognition AI | $2B+ Series E at $48B valuation; Devin autonomous coding agent nears $900M run-rate | DigitalPaani, Algomatic Dynamics, Limetax, Fundly.ai | |
| 2026-09-09 | Bluecore Energy | Floating nuclear reactor barges for ports; $50M seed just 2 months after stealth launch | QNu Labs, ARC Ride, Circolife, Hope Care | |
| 2026-09-08 | Pixxel | $100M Series C, India's largest spacetech round; building orbital AI data centers | Nua, Navana.ai, GalaxEye, Atoms (Kalanick) | |
| 2026-09-07 | Medulance | GPS-dispatched ambulance network raises ₹24 Cr Series A-2 | Comet, Mokobara, Kit (Speakeasy), XDOF |
Sources
- TechCrunch — Blacksmith hits unicorn valuation after Sequoia leads Series C
- AI Weekly — Blacksmith Hits $1B With $66M Series C Led by Sequoia as AI-Written Code Flood Tests Its CI Platform
- Pulse2 — Blacksmith: $10 Million Raised For Unblocking AI Development With Fast CI For GitHub Actions
- Pulse2 — Blacksmith: $3.5 Million Raised For High-Performance CI Cloud Platform
- TipRanks — Blacksmith private company profile
- Tech.eu — Mistral boss and Yann LeCun back Swiss robotics startup Enact in $30M pre-seed round
- Tech.eu — Anglo-Finnish Oxford University quantum spinout raises €12M
- Tech.eu — Portuguese drone maker Beyond Vision raises over €28M to scale production and global expansion
- Crunchbase News — Interesting Startup Deals: Robots, AI, Gaming, Clean Tech