Blacksmith, a San Francisco startup that runs continuous integration workloads on purpose-built hardware, has raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation, the company announced on August 12, 2026. Existing investors Y Combinator and GV also participated, which co-founder and CEO Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash described as both firms “tripling down.” The company’s wager is that the bottleneck in software development is moving. AI coding tools have made producing…