About Blacksmith | Making GitHub Actions Fast
Announcing our Series C led by Sequoia at a $1B valuation.
Blacksmith is fast CI. We are building a high-performance cloud platform with a hardware-software stack purpose-built for CI.
Blacksmith snapshot
From three friends to thousands of users, and we’re just getting started.
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Blacksmith was founded by three friends, University of Waterloo grads, and former engineers from Cockroach Labs and Faire.
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We have grown into a lean team of thirty exceptionally talented, hungry individuals with multidisciplinary backgrounds.
200K
Since launch, we have more than 200,000 happy users. Happy users, happy life.
/ Meet the team
Forged in fire, and lots of spaghetti
In 2024, Aditya Maru, Aditya Jayaprakash, and Aayush Shah met in The Old Spaghetti Factory Canada in Toronto. After a stomach full of spaghetti, they decided to take a leap of faith and start Blacksmith.
Blacksmith co-founders Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru.
Team Members
- Paul Bardea - Founding Engineer
- Bruce Yu - Software Engineer
- David Sevilla - Software Engineer
- Andrew Werner - Software Engineer
- Shreyas Kalyan - Software Engineer
- Piotr Bejda - Software Engineer
- Mark Hetherington - Software Engineer
- Jacob Hands - Software Engineer
- Carl Elbaz - Software Engineer
- Luke Bjerring - Software Engineer
- Max Gale - Software Engineer
- Gracie X. - Product Designer
- Andrew Willis - Product Designer
- Kurt McDonald - Solutions Engineer
- Jacob Buckles - Solutions Engineer
- Abbe Piels - Solutions Engineer
- Trent Bechard - Technical Support Engineer
- Courtney McDermid - Executive Assistant
- Jon Boyer - VP of Sales
- Gino Lucia - Account Executive
- John Gauntlett - Account Executive
- Lauren E. Phillips - Account Executive
- Austin Ortel - Account Executive
- Ryan Wilson - Founding Recruiter
- Katelyn Daniell - Growth Marketing Lead
- Ryan Cooney - Security Compliance
“The Blacksmith team is a relentless crew doing excellent work to mitigate the seemingly inevitable and constant cost increases required to do business in an increasingly complex ecosystem.”
— Spencer Kimball, CEO, Cockroach Labs
Investors
Not just trusted by the best — backed by them too
Not just tech leaders, but an NFL athlete too!
Sequoia Capital](https://www.sequoiacap.com/)
Peak XV Partners](https://www.peakxv.com/)
Google Ventures](https://www.gv.com/)
Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/)
Investor Quotes
- Kelsey Hightower - Former Distinguished Engineer, Google
- Spencer Kimball - CEO, Cockroach Labs
- Peter Mattis - CTO, Cockroach Labs
- Kelvin Beachum - General Partner, Trenches Capital
- Tony Dong - Former VP of Engineering, Rippling
- Eli Brown - Partner, Y Combinator
- Theo Browne - Founder, Theo.gg
- David Cramer - Co-founder, Sentry
“Self-hosting CI is a pain for most DevOps teams. Blacksmith is a no-brainer for any engineering team that wants fast CI, without the overhead of operating infra.”
— David Cramer, Co-founder, Sentry