Blacksmith
Winter 2024The fastest way to run your GitHub Actions
About Company
Blacksmith helps companies run their continuous integration (CI) up to twice as fast, at half the cost. We do this by running their CI on high performance gaming CPUs. - Engineering productivity is often marred by slow CI that grows quadratically with the size of the engineering organization. - On top of this, companies pay high markups to run CI on the hyperscalers. - Consequently, companies have to run their CI on spot instances to keep costs in check. Since spot instances can get pre-empted at any point, running CI reliably on them requires [significant engineering investment](https://www.rippling.com/blog/how-rippling-used-spot-instances-to-save-and-scale-ci-cd). Blacksmith offers CI compute that is more performant, cheaper, and reliable. With Blacksmith, companies do not have to think about CI as they scale. We are starting with GitHub Actions - today's most popular and fastest-growing CI system. With a one-line change, companies can run their CI up to twice as fast on our high-performance hardware. In addition to this, Blacksmith provides colocated warm caches along with optimizations for common CI workloads (like building and pushing Docker images). Aayush, JP and Aditya have gained deep systems and product knowledge from their time at Cockroach Labs and Faire respectively. Both these companies, with several hundred engineers, were spending in the order of millions of dollars on their CI. Yet they were riddled with slow CI and actively seeking out cheaper and faster alternatives. Blacksmith offers exactly this alternative, at a time where being lean is table-stakes for most companies.
Active Founders
Co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith. Aditya was previously an engineer at Faire (YC W17) where he worked on search infra and ads. As a founding member of the ads team, he led retrieval and targeting and helped grow ads from 0 -> $X M. Aditya graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree from the University of Alberta, where he did research in Theoretical Computer Science.
Aditya Maru is the co-founder & co-CTO of Blacksmith. Before starting Blacksmith, Aditya worked at Cockroach Labs. At Cockroach he was a senior engineer on a core database team responsible for implementing disaster recovery solutions. This was where he gained his deep systems knowledge. Aditya graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Science.
Aayush is the cofounder and co-CTO of Blacksmith. Prior to this, Aayush was a software engineer at Superblocks, and worked as a systems engineer on the replication team at CockroachDB before that. Aayush was awarded the Spartan Award at Cockroach Labs for being critical in bringing home the biggest deal in the company's history. Aayush graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Science, which is where he met his co-founders.