Ten days after founder Jay Graber stepped aside as CEO, the decentralised social platform has disclosed a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto, a round that closed last April but was never announced. The timing tells its own story.

There is a quiet irony in the fact that the person who built Bluesky shares her given name with it. Lantian Graber -“blue sky” in Mandarin, a name her mother gave her as a wish for boundless freedom, spent four years turning a Twitter research project into a platform of over 43 million users, a functioning decentralised protocol, and a genuine alternative to the platforms her users had fled. Then, on March 9, 2026, she stepped back.

The company announced on Thursday that it had raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation. The round closed in April 2025. Bluesky is only disclosing it now.

The gap between closing and announcing is itself worth pausing on. For most startups, fresh funding is a press release and a celebratory tweet. Bluesky’s choice to sit on $100 million for nearly a year, and to surface it only after a leadership transition, suggests a company more focused on building than on performing momentum. 

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That leadership now belongs, on an interim basis, to Toni Schneider. The former CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and a partner at True Ventures, Schneider had been advising Graber and the company for over a year before agreeing to step in as the board runs a permanent search.

Graber, for her part, is not going anywhere: she moves into a newly created role as chief innovation officer, focused on building out the AT Protocol, the open social infrastructure that underpins Bluesky’s ambitions.

The split is, by tech company standards, unusually clean. Graber’s own framing was precise: “As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things.” That is not the language of a forced exit. It is the language of a founder who knows what she is good at and, more unusually, what she is not.

Graber was hired by Jack Dorsey in August 2021 to lead what was then a Twitter-funded research initiative into decentralised social media. When she incorporated the project as an independent company later that year, she inherited both an audacious technical premise and a nearly impossible PR challenge: how do you build a decentralised network for people who are, by definition, not yet there?

She managed it. By the time of its $15 million Series A, led by Blockchain Capital in October 2024, the platform had 13 million users. It now has 43 million.

The jump from $15 million to $100 million in a single round reflects more than user growth. It reflects a shift in how investors are reading the decentralised social space, and specifically, Bluesky’s position within it. Where early rounds were bets on a protocol and an idea, this one is a bet on a platform with real scale and a community with demonstrated loyalty.

Bain Capital Crypto’s lead role is worth noting. The firm invests across crypto and web infrastructure, and the AT Protocol, which separates a user’s identity, data, and social graph from any single application, has structural similarities to blockchain-era promises of user ownership, but with far more practical traction.

Knight Foundation’s involvement signals that the press freedom and open-internet communities continue to see Bluesky as infrastructure worth backing, not merely a product.

The money arrives at a moment when Bluesky needs to resolve a tension it has so far managed to defer: how does a platform that has built its identity around rejecting surveillance advertising and algorithmic manipulation actually make money?

The company’s stated model involves subscription services and domain registration fees, functional, but modest. It has not yet demonstrated that this can support a company of its ambitions at the scale it is reaching.

Schneider’s appointment is, in part, an answer to that question. Automattic navigated a similar challenge: it built a massive open-source ecosystem around WordPress and then constructed a sustainable commercial layer on top of it, largely through premium hosting and business services.

If Bluesky follows a comparable path, open protocol beneath, paid services above,it has a template. Whether social networking, with its shorter attention spans and higher churn, tolerates the same approach is not obvious.

The competitive context has shifted considerably since Bluesky’s early days as a curiosity for journalists and tech workers fleeing Elon Musk’s rebranded X. Meta’s Threads, which uses the rival ActivityPub protocol and has been gradually federating with the broader Fediverse, has grown into a formidable alternative with a user base an order of magnitude larger. X itself remains the dominant venue for real-time public discourse, despite persistent predictions of its collapse.

Bluesky’s differentiator has always been structural rather than purely social. The AT Protocol’s architecture, in which a user’s identity and social graph are portable, not locked to any single server, is meaningfully different from both X’s centralised model and Mastodon’s federated but technically demanding alternative. 

What is clear is that the company Graber built has survived its first real test: not the technical challenge of building a decentralised protocol, which it managed, but the organisational challenge of outgrowing its founder without losing what made it worth building in the first place. Schneider’s job is to turn that survival into something more permanent. The AT Protocol, and the 43 million people who have joined so far, will be watching.

A total investment of €260m will boost clean electricity generation, reduce reliance on imported energy and support the delivery of 2030 climate targets, said the Government.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) will support the construction and operation of four new utility-scale solar photovoltaic projects across Ireland via a €100m project finance loan to Dolmen Solar Ltd, a holding company of Power Capital Renewable Energy.

The overall investment – which, in total, will be worth €260m – will see four new solar power operations developed in Clare, Wicklow, Wexford and Tipperary, generating around 367GWh of clean electricity per annum, which is equivalent to the annual consumption of roughly 79,900 households. The funding and development is also expected to create new jobs in construction, civil works, grid connections and maintenance services.

The scheme is among the largest single solar investments financed in Ireland to date and could contribute significantly to Ireland’s target of 80pc renewable electricity by 2030, as well as see out the national ambition for roughly 8GW of installed solar capacity under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme. 

Ballinaclough, Co Wicklow will host a 15.5MWp solar farm, with construction expected to start this month. Tullabeg, Co Wexford will be home to the largest scheme in the portfolio – a 181.6MWp plant – and construction is planned from April. 

In Tipperary, Barnaleen-Cauteen will be the site of a 98MWp farm, and construction is expected to begin this month. Lastly, in Clare, Manusmore near Ennis is earmarked for a 99.5MWp plant, with construction also expected to commence in March.

Work on some of the projects will run into 2028. 

Commenting on the investment, the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O’Brien, TD said: “Ireland is sometimes seen as an unlikely home for solar power, but projects like this show how quickly that perception is changing and how strong the investor appetite now is for Irish renewables.

“This is a very welcome €260m investment, spread across Clare, Tipperary, Wicklow and Wexford, which will boost clean electricity generation right across the country, reduce our reliance on imported energy and support delivery of our 2030 climate targets. The European Investment Bank is playing a key role as a long‑term partner for Ireland’s energy transition”.

The EIB vice-president Ioannis Tsakiris added: “By backing Ireland’s first solar project financed on a pure project finance basis, the EIB is helping to unlock almost 400MW of new renewable capacity that will strengthen Ireland’s energy security and cut greenhouse gas emissions.”

In February of this year, SunArc, a renewable energy company based in Carlow, announced plans to create up to 50 new jobs as a result of a €20m investment into the organisation. The company offers a ‘solar-as-a-service’ model which it said is a significant step towards accelerating Ireland’s transition to clean energy.

SunArc has stated that the solar-as-a-service model will enable businesses to access solar power and energy independence with no upfront costs, removing what it believes to be one of the biggest barriers to solar power adoption.

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Humanoid robotics is advancing rapidly, yet engineers continue to face formidable barriers in locomotion stability, real-time perception, safe human interaction, and power-constrained hardware design. As the industry approaches a projected shift from small-scale prototyping to mass commercialisation in the late 2020s, understanding the component-level decisions that affect system reliability, cost, and performance is becoming critical. This guide examines the technical landscape across sensing, motion, control, and battery subsystems — outlining the design trade-offs, modular architecture trends, and supply chain considerations that will shape the next generation of deployable humanoid platforms.

A North Carolina man was found guilty of extorting a D.C.-based technology company while still being employed as a data analyst contractor.

While a Justice Department press release published on Thursday doesn’t name the victim, court documents reveal that he targeted Brightly Software, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company previously known as SchoolDude, which Siemens acquired in August 2022.

Brightly has been in business for more than 20 years, employs over 700 people, and provides intelligent asset management and maintenance software to over 12,000 clients worldwide, mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

As revealed in the indictment, 27-year-old Cameron Curry (also known as “Loot”) took advantage of his access to Brightly’s payroll information and corporate data to steal sensitive documents, which he used as leverage in an extortion scheme after learning that his six-month contract wouldn’t be extended.

One day after his contract ended on December 10, Curry began sending over 60 extortion emails to Brightly employees using the lootsoftware@outlook.com Microsoft email address and the Loot alias, threatening to leak sensitive information stolen between August and December 2023 unless he was paid a $2.5 million ransom.

With the extortion messages, Curry also attached screenshots of spreadsheets listing the personal identification information (PII) of Brightly employees, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, and compensation information. He also threatened to report the company to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for failing to disclose the breach as required by law.

“We will commence the process of disseminating salary information starting January 1,2024 in phases to all employees and will report you to the SEC after for not reporting the breach,” Curry threatened in one of the extortion emails.

“If you wish to reclaim your data, we recommend doing so promptly at 2.5 million USD in order to save your company and stocks, as each subsequent month will incur a $100,000 USD increase. Discrepancies in your books are currently over 16 million USD, posing a potential risk for retention issues, a hostile work environment, resentment, and more.”

​Following Curry’s numerous extortion emails, Brightly paid $7,540 in Bitcoin, which was transferred to a cryptocurrency wallet controlled by Curry.

The FBI searched Curry’s residence on January 24 after the company reported the incident and seized various electronic devices containing evidence of his extortion scheme.

Curry was released on bond in January 2024 and now faces up to 12 years in prison for six counts of transmitting or willfully causing interstate communications with the intent to extort a victim company.

Brightly also notified customers of a data breach unrelated to this case in May 2023 after attackers gained access to the database of its SchoolDude online platform and stole credentials and personal data (including names, email addresses, account passwords, phone numbers).

Information filed with the Office of the Maine Attorney General revealed that the intrusion was discovered 8 days after the attackers breached Brightly’s systems on April 20, and that the data breach affected nearly 3 million SchoolDude customers and users.

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Wicked: For Good, the second and final movie of the Wicked franchise, is an adaptation of the 2003 Broadway musical. Starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, the film was released in mid-November 2025 and was a huge hit, with an impressive opening of $147M, going on to gross $532M.

Now that it has finally left theaters, Wicked: For Good is set to stream on Peacock from March 20, 2026 – and we’ve found a sneaky way to watch it for just $1.

The future of AI isn’t just agentic; it’s deep personalization. 

Rather than simple recommender systems that correlate user behavior to identify patterns and apply those to individual workflows, large language models (LLMs) and AI agents can analyze users directly to create deeply personalized experiences. 

It’s this kind of aggressive customization users are increasingly demanding — and the savviest enterprises who provide it (and soon) will win. 

The goal is: “Don’t try to randomize, or guess who I am. I tell you, this is what I care about,” Lijuan Qin, head of product, at Zoom AI, explains in a new Beyond the Pilot podcast.  

How Zoom is incorporating personalization

Zoom is one company that has adapted to this trend: Its generative assistant, AI Companion, goes beyond basic summarization, smart recordings, and after-meeting action items to opinion divergence and user alignment tracking. 

Users can customize meeting summaries based on their specific interests, and create targeted templates for follow-up emails to different personas (whether it be a salesperson or account executive). The AI assistant can then automatically populate these documents post-call. Meanwhile, a custom dictionary in Zoom AI Studio can process unique enterprise terminology and vocabulary for more relevant AI outputs, and a deep research mode can quickly deliver comprehensive analyses based on “internal expertise and external insights.”

Control is key here; the human can be “very specific [and] nail down” agent permissioning, Qin explained. They have “very clear controls” on follow-up actions, such as: Can the agent automatically send emails to specific recipients? Or will it trigger a verification step when it recognizes transcripts contain sensitive information (as dictated by the user)? 

Knowing that AI can go off the rails at times, human users can track agent behavior in Zoom, enable and disable features, and control data access. This can help prevent outputs that are inaccurate or off-target.  

“The most important thing is we do not assume AI is smart enough to get everything right,” Qin emphasized. 

Getting context right

In this new agentic AI age, there is essentially a “land grab for context,” Sam Witteveen, co-founder of Red Dragon AI and Beyond the Pilot host, explains in the podcast. 

“Definitely knowing your users is the big thing, right? Knowing what apps they are living in, what day-to-day tasks are they constantly doing?,” he said. “Companies realize the more they have about you, the better the [AI] memory can get, the better they can customize.”

Claude Cowork is one app that is “really shining” at this, Witteveen says; OpenClaw is another. Models are good enough that they can begin to make decisions for users and respond to directions like: “You know a bunch of things about me. You’ve got all this context. Go and generate the skills that are going to help me do a better job.”

“With something like OpenClaw, you can customize it in any way you want, right? You can chat with it, you can tell it, ‘Hey, at 4 o’clock I want you to do this,’” Witteveen said. 

However, token usage and security must always be taken into account, he advised. OpenClaw has been plagued by security issues since its launch. This has prompted many enterprises to uninstall the autonomous agent or outright ban its use; however, these uninstalls must be done correctly so that IT leaders don’t inadvertently delete their entire enterprise stack. 

Meanwhile, in terms of token budget, personalization can run up costs. “You need to think about the metrics you are tracking,” Witteveen said. “This is very different from product to product, but metrics around these things are gonna be key.”

Watch the podcast to hear more about: 

• Why the companies that don’t experiment with AI skills right now “may be toast”

• How Zoom built an AI companion that tracks opinion divergence — not just action items — in your meetings

• Why the build vs. buy question just got a lot more urgent for enterprise software

• Why “skills” may matter more than MCP for the future of enterprise AI

You can also listen and subscribe to Beyond the Pilot on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.