Home / Founders / Aditya Jayaprakash
Jayaprakash is building Blacksmith as AI coding agents push far more code through CI, which makes testing speed and cost a bigger bottleneck for every team.
Aditya Jayaprakash, known as JP, is co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith, a CI compute company that runs GitHub Actions jobs on faster bare-metal machines. He started it in January 2024 with Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, friends from the University of Waterloo.
Studying at the University of Waterloo
He earned a computer science degree at Waterloo and a master's degree at the University of Alberta, where he did research in theoretical computer science, according to his Y Combinator profile. He then joined Faire, working on search infrastructure, and was a founding member of its ads team, where he led retrieval and targeting.
Founding Blacksmith with Cockroach Labs Engineers
Shah and Maru had been engineers at Cockroach Labs. All three had seen large engineering teams spend millions of dollars a year on slow CI. Blacksmith launched from Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch as a cheaper, faster drop-in for GitHub's hosted runners.
Growing Blacksmith Alongside AI Coding
He told TechCrunch in 2025 that the rise of AI coding agents had blown the market wide open. By August 2026 Blacksmith served more than 5,000 customers, including Mercury, Supabase, Clerk, and Ashby, and he said it plans to expand into tools that help developers write, validate, and merge code faster. "Validating code is still a bottleneck," he said, "and it's an even bigger bottleneck because people are writing even more."
