Bluesky is lining up its next phase of growth after confirming it raised $100 million in Series B funding, a major infusion of cash that signals the social network is preparing for bigger moves in product development, hiring, and long-term commercialization. The round was led by Bain Capital Crypto and actually closed back in April 2025, but it’s only being made public now.
The investment also included a mix of returning and new backers. Existing investors Alumni Ventures and True Ventures joined again, alongside newcomers Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and Knight Foundation. This Series B follows Bluesky’s earlier funding milestones: a $15 million Series A that closed in 2024 and an $8 million seed round the year before from Neo and other angel investors. Bluesky did not share an updated valuation with the announcement.
Timing-wise, the funding reveal appears deliberate. It arrives just a week after CEO Jay Graber announced she would step away from the top role and shift into the position of chief innovation officer. That leadership change suggested two things at once: Graber wants to spend more time building and shaping the product, and Bluesky is preparing to bring in a new chief executive focused on scaling the business and driving commercial success.
The momentum behind Bluesky’s growth is hard to miss. Since its Series A, the platform has expanded from 13 million users to more than 43 million global users, reflecting rising interest in alternatives to traditional, centralized social media. At the same time, the broader developer ecosystem around Bluesky’s AT Protocol (ATProto) has been accelerating, helping turn the platform into something larger than a single app.
ATProto is designed for interoperability, meaning different apps can connect and work together through the same open system. That has attracted a wave of new products, ranging from smaller startups like the video app Skylight and an Instagram-style alternative called Flashes, to larger companies like Flipboard, which has been building an open social app called Surf. Community-driven networks are growing as well, including Blacksky, built to support Black social media users.
Because the Series B was led by a crypto-focused venture firm, some users may wonder whether Bluesky is moving toward cryptocurrencies or blockchain features. So far, there’s no indication that’s happening. Bluesky isn’t built on blockchain technology, and it hasn’t integrated crypto into its core experience. Still, Graber’s past work connected to the cryptocurrency Zcash helped influence Bluesky’s decentralized approach, which has naturally drawn investor interest from parts of the crypto world.
Graber has previously described Bluesky’s direction as an evolution of social media away from tightly controlled platforms and toward open, distributed systems that give users more choice and developers more freedom. The concept is less about crypto and more about rebuilding the foundation of social networking so identity, content, and communities aren’t locked inside one company’s walls.
Bluesky says the new funding has been used to scale its team while continuing to develop both the Bluesky app and ATProto itself. That underlying technology now supports what the company calls the Atmosphere, a wider open social ecosystem that includes around 20 billion public records such as posts, likes, comments, and other interactions.
Developer activity is also rising. Bluesky reports more than 400,000 monthly downloads of its developer tools (SDK), and says people use over a thousand different apps built on ATProto every week. Taken together, those numbers point to a platform positioning itself not just as a social network, but as core infrastructure for a broader, open social web.
With fresh capital, a shifting leadership structure, and a rapidly expanding ATProto ecosystem, Bluesky is setting the stage for its next chapter—one that could determine whether open, interoperable social media can compete at mainstream scale.
