Ten days after founder Jay Graber stepped down as CEO, the decentralized social platform announced a $100 million Series B round led by Bain Capital Crypto, which closed last April but was never announced. The timing tells its own story.
There is a quiet irony that the man who built it Bluesky shares her name with him. Lantian Graber – The name given to him by his mother as a wish for endless freedom, “blue sky” in Mandarin, in four years, Twitter has turned the research project into a platform of more than 43 million users, a working decentralized protocol, and a real alternative to the platforms that its users run away from. Then, on March 9, 2026, it was withdrawn.
The company announced Thursday that it has raised $100 million in Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta and the Knight Foundation. The round closed in April 2025. Bluesky is only revealing it now.
The difference between closing and announcing is worth dwelling on in itself. For most startups, new funding is a press release and a celebratory tweet. Bluesky’s choice to sit on $100 million for nearly a year and only reveal it after a leadership transition suggests a company focused more on building than on momentum.
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This leadership is now temporarily held by Tony Schneider. Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and a partner at True Ventures, advised Graber and the company for more than a year before agreeing to join as the board conducts a permanent search.
Graber, for his part, isn’t going anywhere: he’s moving to a newly created chief innovation position focused on building AT Protocol, the open social infrastructure that supports Bluesky’s ambitions.
The unit is unusually clean by tech company standards. Graber’s own framework was precise: “As Bluesky matures, the company needs an experienced operator focused on scaling and execution, and I’m getting back to what I do best: building new things.” This is not a mandatory output language. It’s the language of a founder who knows what they’re good at and, more unusually, what they’re not.
Graber was hired by Jack Dorsey in August 2021 to lead a Twitter-funded research initiative on decentralized social media. When he spun off the project as an independent company later that year, he inherited both an audacious technical premise and a near-impossible PR challenge: How do you build a decentralized network for people who, by definition, aren’t there yet?
He made it. At the time of its $15 million Series A round in October 2024 led by Blockchain Capital, the platform had 13 million users. Now it has 43 million.
The jump from $15 million to $100 million in one cycle reflects more than just user growth. This reflects a shift in how investors are reading the decentralized social space, and specifically Bluesky’s position there. While early rounds are bets on a protocol and an idea, this is a bet on a platform with real scale and a demonstrated loyal community.
It is worth noting the leading role of Bain Capital Crypto. The firm invests in crypto and web infrastructure, and the AT Protocol, which separates a user’s identity, data and social graph from any application, has structural similarities to the blockchain era’s promise of user ownership, but has more practical appeal.
The Knight Foundation’s involvement shows that the free press and open internet communities continue to see Bluesky as more than just a product, but an infrastructure worth supporting.
The money comes at a time when Bluesky must resolve a tension it has so far been able to put off: How does a platform that has built its identity on refusing surveillance advertising and algorithmic manipulation actually make money?
The company’s stated model includes functional but simple subscription services and domain registration fees. It has yet to demonstrate that it can support its ambitions at the scale a company has achieved.
Schneider’s appointment is partly an answer to this question. Automattic solved a similar problem: it built a massive open-source ecosystem around WordPress and then built a sustainable commercial layer on top of it, mostly through premium hosting and business services.
If Bluesky follows a comparable path, then open the protocol below, and if there are paid services above, it has a template. It’s not clear whether social networks, with their shorter attention spans and greater confusion, tolerate the same approach.
The competitive context has changed significantly since Bluesky’s early days as a hobby for journalists and techies running Elon Musk’s rebranded X.Meta’s rival ActivityPub protocol and eschewing Threads, which increasingly merged with Fediverse. X itself remains a dominant space for real-time public discourse, despite persistent predictions of its demise.
Bluesky’s differentiator has always been structural rather than purely social. The architecture of the AT Protocol, where the user’s identity and social graph are portable and not tied to any server, differs significantly from both X’s centralized model and Mastodon’s federated but technically demanding alternative.
What’s clear is that the company Graber founded has passed its first real test: not the technical challenge of building a decentralized protocol that it manages, but the organizational challenge of leaving behind its founder without losing what made it worth building in the first place. Schneider’s job is to turn this survival into something more permanent. AT Protocol and 43 million people who have joined to date will follow.
