Why Join - Blacksmith

As some of you know, we run a GTM recruiting firm @ Crew.

The most common question we get is “how do I know the best company to choose?”

It's probably the most important question to ask. Specific to sales, we've written articles on this before (see 12 traits that make a great sales job).

But I've been really inspired by newsletters like Why You Should Join and Next Play's Spotlights, and I kept thinking: none of these are doing this specifically for go-to-market.

The reason why the distinction is important: a company doing well (press, funding, customers, etc.) and a company being a great place to join on the GTM side are two very different things.

And also, as much as Chris Orlob wants to disagree with me, the company you join is 10x more important than actually being good at sales (which you should definitely still try to do).

So we wanted to create these narrative pieces. Almost like investment memos, but easier to read.

Breaking down:

We did Basis back in February (the "Harvey for accounting"). Then Avoca in April (the AI workforce for the trades). Then Listen Labs in June (the AI-native customer research platform, recently acquired by SFDC).

Today: Blacksmith.

I remember taking the intro call with their VP of Sales, Jon, a couple months back and being like “holy smokes, these guys are ripping - how does no one know about them yet?”

It’s being called the CI cloud: a drop-in replacement for GitHub's runners that's ~2x faster and 60% lower cost on average. Today, they announced a Sequoia-led Series C at a $1 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $125M.

That comes just months after a $45M Series B led by Peak XV (the Supabase and PostHog investors) at $550M, which was itself up from $60M at the Series A. Three priced rounds in roughly a year.

The numbers are legit:

After hearing their numbers/growth, we were compelled to write another one of these.

Let's get into it.

Every engineer knows the feeling: you push a PR (aka a pull request, which means an engineer submitting a code change for review before it goes live), see "waiting for a runner to pick up this job," then sit through 20+ minutes of builds and tests. Something flaky fails. You re-run everything.

For those less technical (like me), a “runner” is just the computer that does the boring, behind‑the‑scenes work every time engineers change code.

Here's the dirty secret: GitHub's hosted runners run on older, low clock-speed cloud CPUs. One VEED engineer had a test suite that took 10 minutes locally and 22 minutes on GitHub-hosted runners. His laptop was beating the cloud.

The usual fixes are all bad:

Now add AI to the mix. Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex mean engineers (and agents) are writing way more code than ever. Every line of it still has to be built, tested, and validated before it merges. Blacksmith says it's heard from customers whose PR volume quadrupled after rolling out Claude Code.

The bottleneck has moved. Writing code got cheap. Validating it didn't.

That's the gap Blacksmith is filling.

This might sound obvious, but TAM is a huge predictor of your future growth at a company.

I didn't optimize for this at one of my last companies before Crew, and it ended up being a real limiting factor. Hope you don't make the same mistake I did 🙂.

The CI compute wedge. GitHub Actions is the default CI (or continuous integration, aka the automatic checks that test every code change before it ships) for the 180M+ developers on GitHub, running ~71M jobs a day. Public repos alone burned 11.5 billion Actions minutes in 2025, up 35% (per Octoverse). Private enterprise usage is the real market.

The bigger vision: compute for the autonomous coding era. Peak XV's thesis: compute is the largest market of this AI cycle, and it's fragmenting into specialized clouds. Blacksmith wants to be the cloud for everything downstream of writing code: builds, tests, validation, and agent sandboxes.

The why-now:

Competition is real (but, paradoxically, that’s usually a sign of a good market): GitHub itself, Cursor Automations, validation built into Codex and Claude Code, the hyperscalers (per TechCrunch), plus runner startups like Depot, Namespace, and Ubicloud.

And GitHub isn't standing still: it cut hosted-runner prices by up to 39% in January 2026. Blacksmith's answer: 50%+ higher single-core performance than GitHub's CPUs.

The buyer: CTOs, VPs of Eng, platform leads, and finance, because the pitch is literally "we'll cut your bill in half."

One-line version: change one line in your GitHub Actions workflow and your CI gets ~2x faster and way cheaper.

That's the migration. No new CI system, no rewritten pipelines.

What you get:

And now Sandboxes, a new business line giving AI agents a place to run code.

The customer ROI numbers are impressive:

Faster and cheaper. Usually you get to pick one.

GTM leadership: Jon Boyer, VP of Sales, joined in January 2026. Before that he was Head of Global Sales at Zapier, with earlier stops at Postman and Slack (plus Softchoice and Flipp). About 15 years building GTM at developer-first and/or product-led companies, which is the exact motion Blacksmith needs: turn bottoms-up adoption into enterprise revenue.

Until Jon, sales was founder-led. The public team page lists a handful of AEs plus solutions engineers.

The founders are three Waterloo CS friends who met 8+ years ago and decided to start Blacksmith over a plate of spaghetti at The Old Spaghetti Factory in Toronto.

Investors:

Offices: SF and NYC. 20 open roles, founded in January 2024 (YC W24).

Culture overview, from their website:

The product is killer.

This is a PLG motion with more than 10,000 companies on the platform, many of whom swapped one line of YAML and cut their CI bill by more than half. Your job is turning that bottoms-up usage into big enterprise contracts. Best possible starting point for an AE.

The ROI story is airtight.

When your pitch is "we'll halve your CI time and your CI bill," the CFO and the VP of Eng are on the same side of the table.

Usage rides the AI coding wave.

Every AI-written line still has to pass CI. Code volume goes up, Blacksmith's consumption goes up. Picks and shovels.

The deal sizes are real + accelerating.

Customers are already spending $1M+ a year. ARR is up 17x since January; imagine what happens with a full sales team.

It's day one for GTM, a true builder + seller role.

~40 employees, a VP of Sales who's been in seat for less than a year, and open roles for AEs (Digital Natives), a Startups Lead working the VC/YC ecosystem, and a GM for Sandboxes. You won't inherit a playbook here; you'll write it. AE → leader paths open up fast at this stage.

Sequoia just led the C.

Sequoia-led Series C at a $1 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $125M. Before that: Peak XV (which upsized after signing) on the B, GV and YC backing every round, and their old Cockroach bosses as angels.

If you're interested, reach out or DM me on LinkedIn and I'll make an intro.

Thanks for reading - we’ll try to publish these monthly with the top companies we’re working with.

If you enjoy it, please give us a rating, review, or follow on Spotify/YouTube/Apple Podcasts - it really helps us grow this.

For those who are new, my name is Chris Balestras, co-founder & head of talent, media, & brand @ Crew - a GTM recruiting, media, and investing firm, working with seed through Series D AI-natives to help them grow.

Where to find Crew:

We work with many of the hottest AI-native startups in various capacities, and for those who are interested, reach out.

🫡 cheers,

Chris