Only revealed publicly last week, X rival Bluesky has confirmed it raised a $100m Series B round in April last year under Jay Graber, led by Bain Capital Crypto.
The April 2025 funding round was led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures.
“In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to meet the rapid growth of both the AT Protocol (atproto) and Bluesky app,” Bluesky said in a statement revealing the funding. “We’re excited to share more as we move into a new era of leadership and further growth.”
Bluesky confirmed the raise was led by Jay Graber, who recently announced she was stepping aside as CEO to become chief innovation officer and to focus on “building the future of open social infrastructure”.
It said the funding has given the social media platform “the foundation upon which to build the future of the open social web without compromising our mission and values”.
Bluesky raised its Series A round in October 2024, and has since grown from 13m users to more than 43m. Bluesky says the “Atmosphere” – the ecosystem of builders, apps and users on atproto – has also been expanding.
“Every week, people use over a thousand apps built on atproto,” the statement said. “Every month, we see over 400,000 SDK downloads. The Atmosphere currently contains about 20bn public records – the posts, likes, comments and other interactions that bring the ecosystem to life.”
Bluesky was first announced in 2019 as a Twitter-funded project that aimed to create an “open and decentralised standard for social media”. It began as an invite-only app and had more than 3m sign-ups before it went open access.
Graber had led the decentralised social media platform since 2021, having worked on it when it was a research project.
On March 9 she said Bluesky needed “a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution”, while she returns to what she does best – “building new things”.
“As part of this transition, Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic [the company behind WordPress] and partner at True Ventures, will join our team as interim CEO, while our board runs a search for a permanent chief executive,” said Graber.
When Elon Musk’s ownership of X led to the removal of moderators and previously banned extreme voices were allowed back onto the platform, many flocked to Bluesky as a more palatable social network, and it saw rapid growth in users. However, in recent times its growth has slowed somewhat, although it has a considerable user base of 43m.
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