The $1B Company Fixing AI’s Software Bottleneck

The gist

1. Blacksmith says it grew 20x in the last year and raised about 66 million in a Series C at a billion-dollar valuation led by Sequoia.
2. The founders say CI workloads resemble video games, needing one very fast thread, so they first rented gaming servers from a German host.
3. The team says moving cached artifacts close to compute is a key speedup, and cut LangChain's 15 to 20 minute compute wait to 10 to 15 seconds.
4. Their first 200 customers came from friends' company logos and personal outbound calls to CTOs, landing five and six-figure contracts without a sales team.
5. With 30 people and 12 engineers, they keep the product small, refuse one-off customer requests, and are building autonomous QA using screenshots and video.