Blacksmith YC Application

Winter 2024Active

Blacksmith went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2024 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2024
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2024

Founders

Aditya (JP) JayaprakashFounder
Aditya MaruFounder
Aayush ShahFounder

What Blacksmith does

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]( 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's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Blacksmith, Winter 2024 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Blacksmith

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

The fastest way to run your GitHub Actions

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We run continuous integration workloads, starting with GitHub Actions, on high-performance gaming CPUs. Our product cuts CI run times by up to half and reduces costs by around 2x. Rather than relying on spot instances on cloud providers, we provide faster, cheaper, and more reliable CI compute with colocated warm caches and workload-specific optimizations like Docker builds.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We are currently remote and the company remains remote post-YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We prioritize hiring and working remotely because our founders and early team members are distributed. This allows us to tap into top talent wherever they are and move fast without relocation overheads.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Blacksmith YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Blacksmith's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Blacksmith would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.