Social Platform Bluesky CEO Reveals Completion of $100 Million Series B Funding After Leadership Change

AI · Bluesky CEO Change Signals Accelerated Commercialization?

IT Home, March 20 — Social platform Bluesky announced the completion of a $100 million (IT Home note: approximately 690 million RMB at current exchange rates) Series B funding round, led by Bain Capital Crypto. The round was actually finalized in April 2025 but was only disclosed recently.

Previously, Bluesky had completed a $15 million (approximately 103 million RMB) Series A funding round in 2024, led by Blockchain Capital, and earlier secured $8 million (about 55.2 million RMB) in seed funding from Neo and several angel investors. Participants in this Series B round include existing investors Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, as well as institutions like Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation. However, Bluesky has not disclosed its latest valuation following this funding round.

It is reported that the $100 million funding will mainly be used to expand the team and continue developing the Bluesky app and the ATProto protocol. Currently, this protocol supports an open social ecosystem called “Atmosphere,” which contains about 20 billion public data records, including posts, likes, comments, and other interactions.

IT Home notes that the timing of this funding announcement coincides with the departure of Bluesky’s former CEO Jay Graber, who has stepped down and taken on the role of Chief Innovation Officer, while venture investor Toni Schneider has been appointed interim CEO. Many believe this indicates Bluesky’s need for a new CEO focused more on commercialization.

On the business front, since Series A, Bluesky’s user base has grown from 13 million to over 43 million. Its application ecosystem built on the underlying AT Protocol (ATProto) is also expanding rapidly, with apps like Skylight (video), Flashes (Instagram-like), and Surf (an open social app under development by Flipboard) all integrated into this system.

The platform’s developer ecosystem is also growing quickly. Official data shows that the ATProto SDK is downloaded over 400,000 times per month, and more than 1,000 applications built on this protocol are used by users weekly, demonstrating that its open social platform strategy is gradually taking shape.