Bluesky Secures $100M Funding Amid Leadership Transition
Bluesky has announced that it has closed a $100 million Series B funding round in April 2025, led by Bain Capital Crypto. The round included participation from existing investors Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, as well as new backers Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation. The company did not disclose its post-money valuation.
The funding follows Bluesky’s $15 million Series A in 2024 (led by Blockchain Capital) and $8 million seed round in 2023. The timing of the announcement—one week after CEO Jay Graber stepped down to become chief innovation officer – signals a strategic shift toward scaling operations and driving commercial growth. Graber, who has led Bluesky since 2021, will now focus on product innovation while the board searches for a permanent CEO with expertise in execution and expansion.
Bluesky has experienced explosive user growth, surging from 13 million to over 43 million global users since its Series A. The platform’s open AT Protocol (ATProto) ecosystem continues to expand, powering interoperable apps such as video platform Skylight, Instagram-style Flashes, and Flipboard’s Surf. New communities like Blacksky have emerged to support underrepresented groups, and developer adoption is accelerating: over 400,000 ATProto SDK downloads occur monthly, with users engaging weekly with more than 1,000 third-party apps built on the protocol.
The broader “Atmosphere” network now contains around 20 billion public records, including posts, likes, comments, and interactions across compatible services. While Bluesky is not built on blockchain, its decentralized design – rooted in Graber’s earlier work on Zcash – has attracted crypto-focused investors. Bain Capital Crypto’s participation highlights interest in open social protocols as alternatives to centralized platforms.
CEO Graber previously described Bluesky’s mission as evolving the social web beyond Web 2.0 centralization into an open, distributed system – without heavy reliance on cryptocurrency branding. The new capital will support team expansion, continued development of the Bluesky app, and enhancements to the ATProto infrastructure.
