Bluesky announces $100M Series B following CEO transition

Social media network Bluesky is gearing up for a big shake-up with today’s news that the company has raised $100 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Bain Capital Crypto, closed in April 2025 but has not been disclosed yet.

Others who participated in the round include existing investors Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, as well as Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta and Knight Foundation. This round follows Bluesky’s $15 million Series A round, led by Blockchain Capital and closed in 2024, and an $8 million seed round from Neo and other angel investors the previous year. Bluesky did not disclose its updated assessment.

The funding news was shared strategically a week after Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced she would step down from the leadership role and become chief innovation officer. The move signaled Graber’s desire to return to construction and the company’s need to hire a CEO who could move Bluesky forward toward commercial success.

Since its Series A, Bluesky has seen rapid growth from 13 million to over 43 million global users now. Its ecosystem of apps running on the AT protocol (also known as ATProto) that interact with each other has also grown, from startups like the video app Skylight or the Instagram alternative Flash to major companies like Flipboard, which is building an open social app, Surf. New communities have also emerged, such as Blacksky, which supports Black social media users.

However, the addition of another cryptocurrency-oriented VC firm may turn off some Bluesky users, especially since the company has not yet integrated cryptocurrencies into its offerings. Bluesky isn’t built on blockchain technology either. However, former CEO Graber’s previous work with the cryptocurrency Zcash helped inspire the social network’s decentralized design, which attracted cryptocurrency investors.

As Graber once told Wired magazine in an interview, “The term Web3 has been closely associated with cryptocurrencies, so it’s not a good word to use for what we do. But if you think of Web3 as an evolution of Social Web 2.0, that kind of… He is What we do. “We are evolving social media that used to rely on centralized companies into something open and distributed,” she said last spring.

The additional funds were used to expand the Bluesky team, while the company continues to develop the Bluesky application and the core ATProto that powers it. The technology now powers a range of applications in the larger open social ecosystem known as Atmosphere, a network containing about 20 billion public records, including posts, likes, comments and other interactions, the company said Thursday.

Additionally, the number of developers relying on ATProto is growing, as evidenced by the more than 400,000 developer kit (SDK) downloads occurring monthly. Additionally, Bluesky says people use more than a thousand apps built on ATProto every week.