Flipboard acquires Graze, the tool for building your own social algorithm

Flipboard has acquired Graze, a Portland startup that lets creators build, tune and monetise custom social feeds without writing code, mainly on Bluesky. Graze says it has delivered more than 41 billion posts to 12 million users since forming 21 months ago.

Flipboard has bought the plumbing for custom social feeds. The company is acquiring Graze, a Portland startup that lets creators and publishers build, tune and monetise their own algorithms without writing code.

The numbers are striking for the size of the team. Graze says it has delivered more than 41 billion posts to 12 million users in the 21 months since it formed, most of that on the newly funded Bluesky.

The team is two people. Co-founder Devin Gaffney and engineer Nick Gerakines both move to Flipboard, after two of the three original founders left last year, and financial terms were not disclosed.

The money behind it was modest. Graze raised a $1mn pre-seed in April 2025 led by Betaworks, with Salesforce Ventures Factorial, Apertu Capital and Skyseed alongside angels from Mozilla and Protocol Labs.

Flipboard has been building toward this for a while. Under chief executive Mike McCue it has invested in AT Protocol, ActivityPub and RSS, and launched Surf, a browser for the open social web.

Gaffney describes the fit as mechanical. “Surf will be the browser for the open social web,” he wrote, while “Graze will be the engine under those feeds.”

His argument is about who curates. As generative AI clogs the legacy platforms, he says a curatorial role in shaping the algorithm is the only sustainable way to run an attention economy.

Europeans already have a thin version of this by law. Article 38 of the Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to offer at least one recommender option not based on profiling.

The difference is what each is for. The regulation guarantees a way to turn the algorithm off, while Graze exists to let someone build a better one and charge for it.

The open social web’s centre of gravity is partly European in any case. Mastodon is German, moved to a non-profit structure and has kept adding ways for people to follow creators without an account.

What happens next is a business question rather than a protocol one. Two people built a feed engine at that scale on a million dollars, and somebody now has to prove that curating attention pays better than harvesting it.