platoseedplatoseed
The fastest way to run your GitHub Actions
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.
Blacksmith provides a drop-in replacement to run GitHub Actions, promising faster CI with lower costs by using bare-metal hardware and co-located caches. It emphasizes observable CI, faster builds, and cost savings compared to GitHub runners.
Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions jobs on bare-metal hardware (gaming CPUs) with high single-core performance, co-locates cache artifacts in the same data center, and uses fast NVMe drives to accelerate Docker builds. It offers instant provisioning of microVMs to avoid waiting for runners, inline logs and a console to debug and spot misconfigurations, and the ability to compare performance and costs against other environments. Pricing claims include being 60% cheaper than GitHub runners and providing faster job execution and caching for CI workflows.
Who it’s for: Teams and organizations using GitHub Actions who want faster, more cost-efficient CI, with observability into CI pipelines and faster Docker builds.
Hiring and funding mentions implied by growth claims and YC/venture backing references on site
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.
Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions on high-performance gaming CPUs on a software stack optimized for CI.
Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions on high-performance gaming CPUs with a CI-optimized software stack to speed up runs and cut costs. It targets teams using GitHub Actions, offering a one-line integration to improve CI throughput and lower spend.
From the original launch (Mar 2024) — may be outdated.
High-performance computing cloud
Accelerate software development with WarpBuild's 10x faster CI infra.
