Social network Bluesky is gearing up for big changes 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 was undisclosed until now.
Others who participated in the round include existing investors Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, as well as Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta and the Knight Foundation. This round follows Bluesky’s $15 million Series A, led by Blockchain Capital and closed in 2024, and the $8 million seed round from Neo and other angel investors last year. Bluesky did not disclose its updated valuation.
News of the funding was strategically shared the week after Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced he was stepping down from the leadership role and transitioning to become chief innovation officer. The move had signaled both Graber’s desire to return to the building and the need for the company to hire a CEO who could lead Bluesky to commercial success.
Since its Series A, Bluesky has seen rapid growth from 13 million to, now, over 43 million global users. Of application ecosystem that run on the AT protocol (also known as ATProto) and interoperate with each other have also been developed, from startups like video app Skylight or Instagram’s Flash alternative to larger companies like Flipboard, which has created an open social networking app, Surf. New communities have also emerged, such as Blackskywhich supports black social media users.
The addition of another cryptocurrency-oriented VC firm may give some Bluesky users pause, however, especially since, so far, the company has not integrated cryptocurrencies into its offering. Neither is Bluesky based on blockchain technology. However, former CEO Graber’s previous work with the cryptocurrency Zcash helped inspire the social network’s decentralized design, which has attracted investors to the cryptocurrency space.
As Graber once upon a time he told Wired in an interview, “the term Web3 has been associated a lot with cryptocurrency, so it’s not a good word for what we do. But if you think about Web3 evolving the social Web 2.0, this kind of it is what we do. We’re evolving social media that was based on centralized companies into something that’s open and distributed,” he said last spring.
The additional funds have been used to scale Bluesky’s team while the company continues to develop Bluesky’s application and underlying ATProto which feeds it. This technology now gives power a range of applications in the largest 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.
In addition, the number of developers relying on ATProto is growing, as evidenced by the more than 400,000 developer toolkit (SDK) downloads that appear each month. In addition, Bluesky says that people use more than a thousand apps built on ATProto every week.
