Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a continuous-integration platform founded in 2024 that runs GitHub Actions on its own hardware rather than rented cloud virtual machines. The company owns and operates a fleet of thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, using gaming-class CPUs selected for single-core performance, and orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker microVMs each month. It serves more than 3,000 companies, and reports that its hardware is roughly twice as fast as standard cloud instances, with cache downloads four times faster and Docker builds up to 40 times faster on persistent NVMe storage.

The technical work spans the full stack: bare-metal server operations, virtualisation via Firecracker, workload scheduling at a scale of 100,000 or more concurrent vCPUs, and a self-managed, petabyte-scale Ceph cluster providing co-located storage. Building the hardware and software together is central to the approach, and the systems are engineered in-house.

Blacksmith was founded by three University of Waterloo graduates who previously worked as engineers at Cockroach Labs and Faire. The company raised $58.5m in funding from Seed through Series B, led by Google Ventures (GV) and Peak XV Capital, and reached significant revenue milestones in under three years. It is based in the United States and operates its infrastructure globally.