Blacksmith: Supercharging GitHub Actions with Optimized CI Compute Blacksmith was founded to address these challenges head-on. By innovating within the CI space, Blacksmith has developed a solution to accelerate CI performance and reduce associated costs.

Few things test a developer's patience like slow Continuous Integration (CI). When every moment counts in the fast-paced world of software development, waiting an extra 30 to 40 minutes for a CI run can be frustrating. Unfortunately, this isn't an issue that only affects those who cut corners; it's a pervasive challenge across the industry.

As the founders of CI solutions provider, Blacksmith, explain, "Slow CI pipelines are an endemic problem throughout the software industry and a major deterrent to productivity for millions of developers worldwide."

Blacksmith was founded to address these challenges head-on. By innovating within the CI space, Blacksmith has developed a solution to accelerate CI performance and reduce associated costs.

The Blacksmith Difference

Automation has the potential to solve slow CI and facilitate a smoother workflow. GitHub Actions, a CI platform that enables automation for build, test, and deployment workflows, offers a convenient way to do this directly from GitHub, and Blacksmith supercharges Github Actions using a one-line code change you can run on gaming CPUs instead of GitHub's older server hardware. Since slow CI performance is primarily caused by inefficient build tools, heavy dependencies, and resource constraints, among others, this often results in less compute time and lower costs.

"We know slow and broken CI pipelines are one of the biggest productivity blockers for software developers," the founders of Blacksmith explain. Research published by GitLab shows that "Downtime = lost revenue. To avoid that dreaded downtime, developers are spending time working on infrastructure and configuration, and they're also not spending that time delivering business logic. In both cases, they're being less productive and working outside their core competencies."

Blacksmith's mission is to help Development Operations (DevOps) teams be more productive by offering a simple-to-integrate solution to reduce CI time, serving their end customers better. Blacksmith is helping companies run their CI 2x faster and 50-75% cheaper, enabling developers to immediately become more productive while developing new features. "Our unique insight is to orchestrate CI workflows over high-performance consumer-grade hardware, which is cheaper and faster than its server-grade counterparts," they explain.

On their mission to help companies better understand CI performance and cost, Blacksmith also provides actionable analytics around which CI pipelines are failure-prone or slow.

Personal Background and Journey

The brainchild of three passionate cloud infrastructure experts, Blacksmith's journey began at the University of Waterloo, where Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Co-Founder and CEO, met Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, Co-Founders and Co-CTOs, as undergraduates. Born and raised in India–Maru from Delhi, Aayush from Mumbai, and JP from Chennai–they all moved to Waterloo for their undergraduate studies. Before launching Blacksmith, Shah and Maru were early engineers at Cockroach Labs, the creator of the popular cloud-native, distributed SQL database, CockroachDB.

JP was an engineer at Faire, a wholesale B2B marketplace, working on search infrastructure and ads. He was a founding member of the ads team and played an essential role in launching ads at Faire, growing it significantly in less than six months.

The experiences the founders gained from these high-growth firms played a huge role in their decision to launch their own software company in 2023, settling on the name Blacksmith because "we realized we had the ideal skillsets to solve this problem and had a unique insight into how to substantially improve the speed of CI pipelines." And because they'd already experienced most of the challenges businesses in this industry face, their journey was exciting and productive from the get-go.

Professional Achievements and Accolades

JP, Shah, and Maru have earned individual recognition for their respective career achievements. In 2021, Shah was awarded Cockroach Labs' inaugural "Spartan Award" for his critical role in bringing home the biggest deal in the company's history. He has also authored research papers at top conferences in distributed systems, such as VLDB and SIGMOD.

JP was a founding member of the Faire ads team and worked on search infrastructure before that. Before Faire, he researched theoretical computer science and authored publications on routing algorithms at top conferences like SODA.

Collectively, Blacksmith's founding team has garnered much attention and earned several awards. "We were accepted into Y Combinator's W24 batch," they reveal. "For its W24 batch, YC received over 27,000 applications and accepted less than 1% (3x more selective than Harvard)." Being in the 1% that made the cut is a matter of great pride for the team. Even more impressive is the fact that over 100 companies, including Slope, Pylon, Fieldguide, Muzz, and GitBook, use Blacksmith to power their CI today.

The financials have been equally impressive. At the time of writing, Blacksmith has raised significant funds from some of the best venture funds in the industry, such as Y Combinator, and prolific angels, including the co-founders of Cockroach Labs and WePay.

Future Goals and Aspirations

Widespread CI/CD adoption is no longer a buzzword describing a future possibility; it is the reality of the modern software development and deployment ecosystem. According to Straits Research, the global market for continuous integration tools is projected to reach over $4.377 billion by 2031.

"Since one of the main objectives of CI tools is to detect and fix software issues faster, enhance software quality, and shorten the time it takes to validate and release new software updates, it is expected that demand for these tools will increase over the projection period," conclude the authors of the Straits report. "Today's highly competitive economy requires a faster pace of technology innovation, which forces IT teams to move closer to the business divisions and regularly refresh their technological skills."

The Blacksmith team hopes to catalyze this adoption and cement the brand's standing as a major player in the CI space. They're already tackling the knowledge gaps that prevent companies, especially small and medium-sized ones, from adopting continuous integration technologies, and are working hard to expand their service offerings.

"Today, this space is highly fragmented, with each software company having to spend resources to implement its own bespoke solutions," conclude the founders. "Blacksmith aims to standardize the industry on a single canonical approach to solving these challenges."

Ultimately, the team's vision reflects a commitment to changing how CI is performed, ensuring that developers can focus on what they do best–creating and delivering exceptional software–without being bogged down by inefficient pipelines. With their continued efforts, Blacksmith is well on its way to making an impact on the CI industry.