# Aditya Jayaprakash

> Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash is the co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith, a San Francisco developer-infrastructure company building a high-performance cloud for continuous integration. A University of Waterloo computer science graduate and former University of Alberta theoretical-computer-science researcher, he later worked on search and advertising infrastructure at Faire before starting Blacksmith with longtime friends Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru. The company joined Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, raised a $3.5 million seed round and a $10 million Series A led by GV, and grew from a one-line GitHub Actions runner swap into a broader compute, observability, and security platform for software delivery.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Blacksmith
- **Organizations:** Blacksmith, Faire, University of Alberta, University of Waterloo, Y Combinator
- **Education:** Bachelor of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Master of Science in Computing Science, University of Alberta, Winter 2024 batch, Y Combinator
- **Known for:** Co-founded Blacksmith with Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru and led it through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch., Raised a $3.5 million seed round and a $10 million Series A led by GV for Blacksmith., Helped grow Faire's advertising product from launch while leading ads indexing and retrieval engineering.

## Career timeline

- **2019-2021** — Worked as a graduate research assistant at the University of Alberta, focusing on approximation algorithms in theoretical computer science.
- **2021** — Completed a master's degree in Computing Science at the University of Alberta.
- **2021-2024** — Worked as a software engineer at Faire across search infrastructure and the ads team, where he led engineering work on indexing and retrieval.
- **2022** — Co-authored a SODA paper on approximation schemes for capacitated vehicle routing.
- **2023** — The vehicle-routing research appeared in ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
- **2023** — Began exploring the ideas that became Blacksmith after a dinner conversation about CI with Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru.
- **2024** — Co-founded Blacksmith and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch as CEO.
- **2025-05** — Blacksmith announced a $3.5 million seed round led by GV with Y Combinator and angel investors.
- **2025-09** — Blacksmith announced a $10 million Series A led by GV and launched Test Analytics.
- **2026-06** — Appeared on Megaport's Uplink podcast to discuss how AI-generated code increases pressure on CI infrastructure.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Blacksmith with Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru and led it through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.
- Raised a $3.5 million seed round and a $10 million Series A led by GV for Blacksmith.
- Helped grow Faire's advertising product from launch while leading ads indexing and retrieval engineering.
- Co-authored research on approximation schemes for capacitated vehicle routing that appeared at SODA 2022 and in ACM Transactions on Algorithms in 2023.
- Reported that Blacksmith reached $3 million ARR and handled more than 400,000 builds per day in 2025.
- Built Blacksmith from an early GitHub Actions runner replacement into a CI cloud spanning compute, caching, observability and security.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Blacksmith published a detailed postmortem after a July 21 control-plane outage, outlining alerting, Redis and recovery changes.
- **2026-06** — Jayaprakash appeared on Megaport's Uplink podcast to discuss AI coding agents, rising CI volume, microVMs, caching and infrastructure scaling.
- **2025-12** — He published Blacksmith's analysis of GitHub's new per-minute Actions platform fee and its implications for hosted and self-hosted runners.
- **2025-09** — Blacksmith announced a $10 million Series A led by GV and introduced Test Analytics.
- **2025-06** — Blacksmith introduced a bright yellow rebrand intended to make an infrastructure company more distinctive and memorable.

## Links

- Website: https://blacksmith.sh
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adijp
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/adijayaprakash
- GitHub: https://github.com/adijp

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/aditya-jayaprakash
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-17