Bluesky announces $100M Series B after CEO transition

Bluesky, the social networking platform, has made headlines with its recent announcement of securing $100 million in Series B funding. This significant investment round, which was closed in April 2025, was spearheaded by Bain Capital Crypto and also saw contributions from returning investors such as Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, alongside new partners like Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation. This funding milestone follows Bluesky's previous financial achievements, including a $15 million Series A round led by Blockchain Capital in 2024 and an $8 million seed round from Neo and various angel investors the year before. Although the company has not revealed its latest valuation, the influx of capital comes at a crucial time as CEO Jay Graber transitions to the role of chief innovation officer, a move she indicated was influenced by her desire to focus on development and the need for new leadership to propel Bluesky towards commercial success. Since completing its Series A funding, Bluesky has experienced remarkable user growth, increasing its global user base from 13 million to over 43 million. The platform has also expanded its ecosystem of applications utilizing the AT Protocol, known as ATProto, which facilitates interoperability among various apps. Notable projects include Skylight, a video app, and Flashes, an alternative to Instagram, alongside larger ventures like Flipboard, which is developing its own open social app called Surf. Additionally, niche communities, such as Blacksky, have emerged to support Black users on social media. While the involvement of another crypto-focused venture capital firm may raise concerns for some users—especially given Bluesky's current lack of cryptocurrency integration—the company's decentralized framework, inspired in part by Graber's work with Zcash, continues to attract interest from the cryptocurrency sector. Graber has previously articulated that Bluesky's mission transcends the traditional Web3 narrative often associated with cryptocurrencies, aiming instead to evolve the centralized social media landscape into a more open and distributed format. The newly acquired funds are being utilized to expand Bluesky's workforce and enhance the development of its application and the underlying ATProto technology. This technology now supports a vast array of apps within the open social ecosystem dubbed the Atmosphere, which currently boasts around 20 billion public records, including posts, likes, comments, and other user interactions. Furthermore, the number of developers engaging with ATProto is on the rise, as evidenced by over 400,000 monthly downloads of development tools (SDK), with users accessing more than 1,000 applications built on the protocol each week.