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The $1B Company Fixing AI’s Software Bottleneck

Y Combinator 2. 11. 2026 16:29

Blacksmith (YC W24) is building a faster cloud for continuous integration (CI), helping developers test and ship code as AI coding tools generate more of it. As software production accelerates, testing and validation are becoming the new bottleneck. That shift has helped Blacksmith grow 20x over the last year, and the company recently raised a $66 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. The founders started as outsiders to DevOps and built their first infrastructure using the same high-performance CPUs found in gaming PCs, renting servers originally designed for Minecraft and Call of Duty.

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