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Ten days after founder Jay Graber stepped down as CEO, the decentralized social platform has unveiled a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto, a round that closed last April but was never announced. The moment tells its own story.
There is a quiet irony in the fact that the person who built blue sky She shares her first name with him. Lantian Graber – “blue sky” in Mandarin, a name his mother gave him as a wish for unlimited freedom – spent four years turning a Twitter research project into a platform of more than 43 million users, a functional decentralized protocol and a genuine alternative to the platforms its users had fled. Then, on March 9, 2026, he took a step back.
The company announced on Thursday that it had raised $100 million in a Series B round 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 now revealing it.
It’s worth dwelling on the gap between closing and announcing. For most startups, new funding consists of a press release and a celebratory tweet. Bluesky’s decision to sit on $100 million for nearly a year and release it only after a leadership transition suggests a company more focused on building momentum than building momentum.
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That leadership now belongs, on an interim basis, to Toni Schneider. Schneider, former CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and a partner at True Ventures, had been advising Graber and the company for more than a year before agreeing to step in while the board conducts an ongoing search.
Graber, for her part, isn’t going anywhere: she’ll take on a newly created role as chief innovation officer, focused on building the AT Protocol, the open social infrastructure that underpins Bluesky’s ambitions.
The division is, by technology company standards, unusually clear. Graber’s own approach was precise: “As Bluesky matures, the company needs an experienced operator focused on scaling and execution, while I get back to what I do best: building new things.” That is not the language of a forced exit. It’s the language of a founder who knows what she’s good at and, more unusually, what she’s not good at.
Graber was hired by Jack Dorsey in August 2021 to lead what was then a Twitter-funded research initiative on decentralized social networks. When he incorporated the project as a standalone company later that year, he inherited a bold technical premise and a nearly impossible PR challenge: How do you build a decentralized network for people who, by definition, aren’t there yet?
She made it. At the time of its $15 million Series A, led by Blockchain Capital in October 2024, the platform had 13 million users. Now it has 43 million.
The jump from $15 million to $100 million in a single round reflects more than just user growth. It reflects a shift in how investors interpret the decentralized social space and, specifically, Bluesky’s position within it. While the first rounds were bets on a protocol and an idea, this is a bet on a platform with real scale and a community with proven loyalty.
It is worth noting the leading role of Bain Capital Crypto. The company invests in crypto and web infrastructure, and the AT Protocol, which separates a user’s identity, data, and social graph from any single application, has structural similarities to the user-ownership promises of the blockchain era, but with much more practical traction.
The Knight Foundation’s involvement indicates that the free press and open internet communities continue to view Bluesky as an infrastructure worth supporting, not simply a product.
The money comes at a time when Bluesky needs to resolve a tension it has so far managed to put off: How can a platform that has built its identity around rejecting surveillance advertising and algorithmic manipulation actually make money?
The company’s stated model involves functional, but modest, subscription services and domain registration fees. It has not yet proven that this can support a company in its ambitions at the scale it is achieving.
Schneider’s appointment is, in part, an answer to that question. Automattic faced a similar challenge: it built a massive open source ecosystem around WordPress and then built a sustainable commercial layer on top of it, largely through premium hosting and enterprise services.
If Bluesky follows a comparable path, open protocol below, paid services above, it has a template. It’s not obvious whether social media, with its shorter attention spans and higher churn, tolerates the same approach.
The competitive landscape has changed considerably since Bluesky’s early days as a curiosity for journalists and tech workers fleeing Elon Musk’s renowned X. Meta’s Threads, which uses the rival ActivityPub protocol and has gradually been federated with the broader Fediverse, has become a formidable alternative with an order of magnitude larger user base. X itself remains the dominant site for real-time public discourse, despite persistent predictions of its collapse.
Bluesky’s differentiator has always been structural rather than purely social. The architecture of the AT protocol, in which a user’s identity and social graph are portable, not locked to any single server, is significantly different from both X’s centralized model and Mastodon’s federated but technically demanding alternative.
What is clear is that the company that built Graber has survived its first real test: not the technical challenge of building a decentralized protocol, which it succeeded, but the organizational challenge of overtaking its founder without losing what made it worth building in the first place. Schneider’s job is to turn that survival into something more permanent. The AT Protocol and the 43 million people who have joined so far will be watching.
