Social network Blue sky is gearing up for big changes with today’s announcement that the company has raised $100 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Bain Capital Crypto, closed in April 2025 but had not been disclosed until now.
Other participants 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 Aled by Blockchain Capital and closed in 2024, and its $8 million funding round Since Neo and other angel investors the previous year. Bluesky did not disclose its updated valuation.
Funding news was shared strategically the following week Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced his resignation of the main role and the transition to become director of innovation. The move had signaled both Graber’s desire to return to construction and the company’s need to hire a general manager who could lead Bluesky to commercial success.
Since its Series A round, Bluesky has grown rapidly from 13 million to over 43 million users worldwide. It is application ecosystem that work on the AT protocol (also known as ATProto) and interact with each other has also grown, thanks to startups like Skylight video app Or Alternative flashes to Instagram to large companies like Flipboard, which created an open social application, Surf. New communities also arose, as Black skywhich supports black social media users.
The addition of another crypto-focused venture capital firm, however, could give some Bluesky users pause, especially since, so far, the company has not integrated cryptocurrencies into its offering. Bluesky is also not built on blockchain technology. Yet former CEO Graber’s previous work with the cryptocurrency Zcash helped inspire the social network’s decentralized design, which appealed to investors in the crypto space.
Like Graber once told Wired in an interview, “the term Web3 has become very associated with cryptocurrency, so it’s not a good word to use for what we do. But if you think of Web3 as the evolution of Social Web 2.0, that kind of East what we do. We are transforming social media that was based in centralized companies into something open and distributed,” she said last spring.
The additional funds were used to scale the Bluesky team as the company continues to develop the Bluesky application and underlying. ATProto which feeds it. This technology now powers a range of applications in the largest open social ecosystem known as Atmosphere – a network that contains approximately 20 billion public records, including posts, likes, comments and other interactions, the company announced Thursday.
Additionally, the number of developers relying on ATProto is growing, as evidenced by over 400,000 developer tool (SDK) downloads each month. Additionally, Bluesky claims that people use over a thousand apps built on ATProto every week.
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