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Every time a developer writes code, [music] they have to run a bunch of checks to make sure that nothing is broken.
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That process is called CI and Blacksmith writes infrastructure to run those really, really fast.
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We've grown 20x in in the last [music] year.
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We recently raised our series C.
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This was done at a billion dollar valuation led by Seoia and we raised about 66 million. We were outsiders.
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We were not platform engineers.
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We didn't work in DevOps.
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In fact, none of us had written a CI pipeline before.
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>> When I think about why we were one of the only ones to to approach the problem this way and to think of it this way, I think the part of the answer here is just being naive enough in the right way to [music] not kill a good idea before it meets the market.
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So today with um [music] with Agentic coding tools, developers are writing more and more code than they ever were.
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But it's not very useful to write 100 times [music] the code if you can't ship it at that speed.
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So now the bottleneck has become not writing the software but validating it.
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And that usually means waiting on your CI.
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So that means making sure that the tests are passing and [music] that you have confidence that what you're shipping actually works.
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>> I always wanted to come to Silicon [music] Valley and start a company.
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When I was in high school, my favorite thing to do was surf Wikipedia pages and I would read about technology companies and how they were founded and what they did and I wanted to do something of my own.
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I actually went to Waterloo cuz they had a pretty great startup [music] program and a lot of founders came from Waterloo and they were very technical school.
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After I started working at fair, I would start thinking a lot about ideas and and and how I can move and actually blacksmith is my second application to YC.
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The three of us were friends from undergrad.
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We were all in Toronto at the time and we all wanted to start a company and [music] we were riffing ideas around what we thought we should work on and all of us were engineers.
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Pretty much at every company we worked at CI universally sucked and it sucked because it was super slow but managing this piece of infrastructure was a pain across the board and [music] we felt we had a better way.
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When we initially talked about the idea for what became blacksmith, we were initially kind of skeptical whether this could work.
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But over time, as we did more research, our conviction continued to grow.
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My co-founders were database engineers.
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I was working on search infrastructure.
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But from the outside, we sort of saw that the reason managing CI info was so hard, the shape of the workload is very different from what hyperscalers like AWS, GCP, and Azure are actually really good at.
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And it almost felt like a mismatch that caused the pain.
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And we felt like the real way out is building a cloud that is extremely good at running CI workloads.
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It comes down to using the best tool for the job.
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What we started to realize was the characteristics of CI workloads are a lot similar to you know desktop applications in particular video games that you would run on your typical gaming PC in that they don't care as much about multiple kind of threads of execution but they care about that one single thread of execution being really really fast.
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When we started off, we would rent these servers from this German data center services company that was known for hosting Minecraft servers and Call of Duty game servers.
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Over time, as our scale has grown, we've started to own more and more of the stack.
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So now we sort of operate at at, you know, much larger uh levels of agreements with data center providers where we're effectively buying megawatts of power rather than individual machines.
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So I actually invested in Blacksmith twice.
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I led their initial round out of Y Combinator which was on a safe and then a few months later I actually led their series A [music] and joined the board.
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I think it was super interesting that they were using gaming CPUs because I'd never seen anyone else try that solution for CI.
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It was even kind of a shock to me that somebody would even put a bunch of these things in one place.
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That was sort of the weird thing.
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You usually would have it at home for your like single, you know, your big box you have under your desk and you're like, you know, you're playing whatever game.
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But yeah, being like, "No, we need to have buy like a hundred of these things and use them to compile."
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Like that that's where I was like, "Oh, that's that's kind of different."
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>> A large part of making CI fast is skipping redundant work that has already been done before.
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At a high level, this is what developers refer to as caching.
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A big part of Blacksmith's special sauce is moving cache artifacts close to the compute nodes.
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>> The first 200 customers were extremely hard.
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Initially, we actually asked our friends who were working at companies [music] to give us a shot.
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We asked them for logo rights and we were able to put these logos on our site and build a bit of credibility and using that I would personally called outbound CTO's and VP of engineering personas and platform engineers and try to get them to use the product.
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The earliest customers we had were small companies like ourselves.
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They cared about moving really fast and so they wanted really fast CI and there was also very little red tape.
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The only real way to win over engineers is to really perform and again to solve a problem in a way that they probably wouldn't be able to do themselves.
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You know, they're very discerning.
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They like to try a bunch of new tools.
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Sometimes they aren't the stickiest customers.
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>> Without any sales team, they were able to get kind of large five six figure contracts because of [music] just how easy Blacksmith made it to optimize and run your CI as fast as possible. We make it really easy.
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In one click, you can switch over [music] all of your CI to us.
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One of the customers that onboarded onto Blacksmith recently was [music] Langchain.
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Langchain was previously running their CI on GCP.
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On GCP, their developers would routinely wait 15 to 20 minutes to even acquire [music] compute to run the CI job.
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On Blacksmith, because we effectively expose an infinite [music] pool of compute, this wait time went down from 15 to 20 minutes to anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds, significantly improving the velocity at which their developers could push code.
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[music] A big push for Blacksmith now is to get the word out that when any engineering team thinks about CI velocity or [music] gaining trust in the code that they're generating, they immediately think of Blacksmith.
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[music] To this effect, we are rolling out a massive marketing campaign across both San Francisco and New York.
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We're taking over 15 subway stations in New York.
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We're wrapping a subway train in our bright yellow color.
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[music] When I joined, the team was about five people.
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We were running a small cluster of a couple hundred servers and today we've seen kind of many orders of magnitude more scale.
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Now we're a team of 30 people, 12 engineers.
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It boils down to a few key decisions we've we've made and kind of continue to make as we as we go along.
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[music] We have a lot of bespoke software.
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One to just manage the growth of our fleet.
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We have a lot of kind of bespoke observability at every layer of the stack.
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And secondly, we are ruthless about keeping the surface area of the product small and manageable and only scaling it with the size of the team rather than giving into one of bespoke customer requirements.
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And a big payoff of that kind of focus is that we're able to scale uh to a very large, you know, number of of machines and a very large number of customers with just a very small team.
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>> So, one of the largest challenges is keeping up with the demand.
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One thing that we're seeing is every [music] time uh new LLM drops, um we see a massive spike in CI usage as people rush to test it out and ship more code.
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So because it takes time for to order and install machines, we have to get creative technically to support that load.
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So that means better algorithms for placing our jobs, getting uh more clever around how we can pack jobs more efficiently, more efficient network topologies.
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So, right after our series B announcement early on in the summer, a power surge in Phoenix took out both our primary and backup cooling systems in one of the biggest data centers that we operate in Phoenix.
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Our customers were affected with, you know, longer startup times for their jobs during that window of outage.
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That underscored the importance of being geographically distributed for Blacksmith.
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We want to help give developers confidence in their code changes.
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And as part of that, one of the products that we're working on is to do autonomous QA where we gather artifacts like screenshots or video snippets that induce confidence in a change.
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With the amount of code that's being produced, developers won't have time to go and try to understand if things are working.
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They're going to look for evidence and Blacksmith is going to give them confidence to merge their code faster.
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We want to remove that bottleneck and allow developers to [music] basically bring shipping software as close as they can to their speed of thought.