Bluesky, the innovative social networking platform, has announced a significant milestone, securing $100 million in Series B funding. This funding round, spearheaded by Bain Capital Crypto, was finalized in April 2025 but was only revealed recently.
Notable contributors to this funding include existing backers such as Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, along with new participants like Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation. This latest round follows a successful $15 million Series A in 2024 and an $8 million seed round in 2023, although Bluesky has not disclosed its current valuation.
The announcement comes shortly after CEO Jay Graber's transition to Chief Innovation Officer, a strategic move that reflects her desire to focus on product development while paving the way for new leadership to drive commercial growth.
Since its Series A funding, Bluesky has experienced remarkable expansion, increasing its user base from 13 million to over 43 million globally. The platform's ecosystem of applications utilizing the AT protocol has also flourished, featuring startups like Skylight, a video app, and Flashes, an Instagram alternative, alongside larger entities like Flipboard, which is developing the open social app Surf. Additionally, new communities such as Blacksky have emerged, supporting Black social media users.
The involvement of a crypto-focused venture capital firm might raise questions among some users, especially since Bluesky has yet to incorporate cryptocurrencies into its offerings. Despite not being built on blockchain technology, Graber's previous work with Zcash has influenced the decentralized design of Bluesky, attracting interest from the cryptocurrency sector.
Graber previously articulated the vision for Bluesky, emphasizing the evolution of social media from centralized platforms to open and distributed systems, aligning with the broader notion of Web3.
The newly acquired funds are being utilized to enhance Bluesky's workforce and further develop its app and the underlying atproto technology. This infrastructure now supports a variety of applications within the open social ecosystem known as Atmosphere, which encompasses approximately 20 billion public records, including posts and interactions.
Moreover, the number of developers leveraging atproto is on the rise, with over 400,000 downloads of development tools each month. Bluesky reports that more than a thousand applications built on atproto are actively used each week, signaling a vibrant and growing ecosystem.