Battle Card: Blacksmith’s $10M CI Trigger

🚀 Battle Card: Blacksmith

• Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Co-Founder & CEO 📧 aditya@blacksmith.sh

• This Blacksmith sales trigger underscores a shift away from slow, hyperscaler-based CI toward high-performance hardware runners that cut costs and boost throughput. → Source

• Slow build times causing release delays

• Escalating infrastructure costs on public clouds

• Primary: Tuned CI hardware clusters → 50% faster builds & 30% lower infra spend

• Expansion: Pipeline observability suite → Real-time health metrics & alerting

• HQ: San Francisco, CA

• Employees: ≈ 35

• Rev: ≈ $2M

• Website: blacksmith.sh

🤼 Competitive Intel

• CircleCI — CI/CD Platform
• Unique edge: Deep GitHub Actions integration
• Evaluated by Engineering Managers for speed

• Buildkite — Self-hosted CI
• Unique edge: Scalable, secure pipelines on your hardware
• Evaluated by DevOps for security compliance

• GitLab — DevOps Platform
• Unique edge: Unified SCM + CI/CD in one interface
• Evaluated by VP of Engineering for feature breadth

• Jenkins — Open-source CI
• Unique edge: Unlimited customization & plugin ecosystem
• Evaluated by Infrastructure teams for flexibility

✅ Do-Now Checklist

Next Step

🧠 Copy My Prompt for Personalized Cold Outreach

────────────────────────────
✏️ YOUR COMPANY
────────────────────────────
OUR_COMPANY   = ❑❑
OFFER_BRIEF   = ❑High-performance CI hardware that cuts build times by 50% and lowers infra costs by 30%❑
PROOF_METRIC  = ❑50% faster builds❑
CTA_STYLE     = ❑quick_call❑
TONE          = ❑friendly❑

────────────────────────────
📌 TARGET COMPANY
────────────────────────────
NAME        = Aditya
COMPANY     = Blacksmith
DEPT        = Engineering
SIZE        = 35
BOTTLENECK  = build bottlenecks
EVENT       = Secures $10M Series A
DETAIL      = Securing a $10M Series A funding round
PAIN        = Slow build times causing release delays
SRC         = https://vcnewsdaily.com/blacksmith/venture-capital-funding/cmlvqcmbdw
SIM_CO      = Buildkite
WIN_METRIC  = 50% faster builds
NEXT_SIZE   = 60
EMP_EST     = ≈ 35
REV_EST     = ≈ $2M

────────────────────────
TASK FOR CHATGPT
────────────────────────
Role: “NewsletterForLeads SDR-Assist”.

Validate any ≈ guesses via SRC.

EMAIL  (keep breaks):
Subject: 35-person Engineering

Aditya—noticed your Engineering team is ≈ 35.

That’s when build bottlenecks slow growth.

We helped Buildkite fix this with High-performance CI hardware that cuts build times by 50% and lowers infra costs by 30%.

Result: 50% faster builds.  
Quick call?

PS—next bottleneck hits ≈ 60.

DM ≤45 words, TONE:
Saw your post about Securing a $10M Series A funding round — Slow build times causing release delays.  
High-performance CI hardware that cuts build times by 50% and lowers infra costs by 30%. 50% faster builds.  
Quick chat?