The social platform Bluesky is preparing for significant transformations, as evidenced by today’s announcement that the enterprise has secured $100 million in Series B capital. This investment round, spearheaded by Bain Capital Crypto, was finalized in April 2025 but remained unrevealed until the present moment.
Additional participants in this funding initiative include current backers Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, alongside Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and Knight Foundation. This recent injection of capital follows Bluesky’s $15 million Series A, led by Blockchain Capital and closed in 2024, and its $8 million seed round from Neo and various angel investors from the preceding year. Bluesky did not disclose its current market valuation.
The news of this capital injection was deliberately released the week after Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced her decision to step down from her executive position, transitioning instead to assume the role of Chief Innovation Officer. This development indicated both Graber’s inclination to refocus on creation and the necessity for the firm to appoint a chief executive capable of propelling Bluesky towards market triumph.
Since its Series A, Bluesky has experienced swift expansion, growing from 13 million to, currently, over 43 million global users. Its suite of applications that utilize the AT protocol (also known as atproto) and interoperate seamlessly has also expanded. This growth encompasses emerging companies like the video app Skylight or the Instagram alternative Flashes, to larger entities such as Flipboard, which has been developing an open social application called Surf. New communities have also formed, such as Blacksky, which assists Black social media users.
The inclusion of another cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm may, however, cause some Bluesky users to pause, particularly as, to date, the company has not incorporated digital currencies into its services. Furthermore, Bluesky is not founded upon blockchain technology. Nonetheless, former CEO Graber’s prior involvement with the cryptocurrency Zcash significantly influenced the social platform’s distributed architecture, a characteristic that has attracted backers from the blockchain sector.
As Graber once stated to Wired in a conversation, “the term Web3 became closely linked with cryptocurrency, so it’s not an appropriate descriptor for our endeavor. But if you consider Web3 as transforming the social Web 2.0, that precisely *is* what we’re doing. We’re transitioning social platforms that were founded on centralized entities into something that is open and decentralized,” she indicated last spring.
The supplementary capital has been deployed to expand Bluesky’s team, while the company simultaneously continues to refine Bluesky’s app and the foundational atproto protocol that drives it. This technology now supports numerous applications within the broader open social ecosystem known as the Atmosphere — a network that currently encompasses approximately 20 billion public data entries, comprising posts, likes, comments, and other interactions, the company announced on Thursday.
Furthermore, the number of developers building on atproto is increasing, as demonstrated by the exceeding 400,000 downloads of its software development kits (SDKs) observed monthly. Moreover, Bluesky reports that individuals utilize over a thousand apps built on atproto every week.
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