Blacksmith
Blacksmith, based in San Francisco, CA, provides advanced CI solutions that are faster and more cost-effective, targeting B2B clients in the United States and Canada.
Company Overview
Blacksmith, based in San Francisco, CA, operates within the B2B industry, particularly focusing on developer tools, DevOps, cloud computing, and infrastructure. The company consists of a lean team of 3 members and is part of the Y-Combinator batch of Winter 2024 (W24). Blacksmith aims to address the challenges companies face with slow and costly continuous integration (CI) processes by offering faster, cheaper, and more reliable CI solutions.
Services
Blacksmith provides colocated warm caches and optimizations for common CI workloads such as building and pushing Docker images. The service offers CI compute on high-performance gaming CPUs, claiming to run CI up to twice as fast at half the cost. Blacksmith supports GitHub Actions and features isolated, ephemeral VMs per job execution, NVMe backed volumes for fast I/O, 25GB actions cache per repository, 400MB/s cache download speed, and unlimited concurrent jobs.
Founders
The founding team of Blacksmith includes Aayush, JP, and Aditya, who bring extensive systems and product knowledge from their experiences at Cockroach Labs and Faire. These previous roles provided insights into managing CI for large engineering teams, with both Cockroach Labs and Faire reportedly spending millions of dollars on their CI operations.
Security and Technology
Blacksmith ensures the security of its CI processes through isolated virtual machines for job executions and by using single-use GitHub access tokens per job. The technology stack includes memory-safe languages like Go and Rust. Additionally, the company secures network connections end-to-end with Tailscale, a modern VPN solution designed for secure and easy networking.
Product Features
Blacksmith's CI service includes several distinct features: it supports unlimited concurrent jobs, utilizes fast I/O with NVMe backed volumes, and provides a 25GB actions cache per repository. The service delivers 400MB/s download speeds from the actions cache and offers a free trial with 3000 free minutes without requiring a credit card. Future plans include introducing lightning-fast Docker builds, enabling debugging of GitHub Actions, and offering custom runner images.