This round of investment was conducted back in April 2025, but finally announced in this posting on March 19, 2026. The company had previously mentioned in October 2024 their successful Series A funding. Both of these were initiated by former CEO Jay Graber who stepped down recently and transitioned into the role of Chief Innovation Officer.
Bluesky is a Twitter-like social media microblogging platform that initially was a project within Twitter to serve as research for decentralizing that platform. It was later spun off into its own PBC (public benefit corporation) and after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, Bluesky became more than just the protocol and began building a user facing frontend (in order to serve as an alternative). Parts of the liberal/progressive political demographic moved over to Bluesky.
Reading some posts, it seems some were surprised regarding this Series B funding (given that the announcement came 11 months after). It shouldn’t have been when the $15 million Series A round was already known and the company occasionally noted their growth in its user numbers and traffic; it made logical sense (at least to me) that they would be attempting the next round given their growth. Similarly, it is within logical reasoning that they may attempt a Series C before looking into the possibility of an IPO (or if there is still venture capitalists, continuing with this Series funding).
Backing up a small bit, there was a short period when I considered archiving my blogs (still on Blogger at the time) to focus on microblogging on Bluesky. I eventually came to the conclusion to not be reliant on any major platform (which led me to migrate off of Blogger). Settling on Bluesky wouldn’t have served me well either (there would’ve been too much constraints where self-brevity would’ve been a failure). What I have (rebuilt) now is far better in terms of being mostly in control.
The other red flag for me was the lead investor in the Series A, Blockchain Capital which is a venture capital firm (formerly known as Crypto Currency Partners) which has mainly focused on bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related projects. Jay Graber herself has a background mostly in cryptocurrency before being tapped to become CEO of Bluesky. As it turns out, this Series B lead investor is another crypto focused firm, Bain Capital Crypto.
To keep this very simple, these early funding rounds are where the majority of stake claimers cement their influence/voting power (owning a larger percentage of the company plus larger blocks of preferred shares which are normally structured to give this class greater voting power in the event that the company actual goes public on the retail market).
The size of this Series B ($100 million) also highlights the money making expectations by the backers (with the leads being heavily in the crypto world along with Grabers background). In short, expect some form of monetization (ads being likely) to begin generating the return on investment (ignore the nice sounding pleasantries of remaining free and open). The crypto influence (Graber herself and the lead investors in these first two series) should also tell people what they need to know when it comes to what sort of tie-in’s might be implemented for the platform.
Let me just cut to the chase… expect some level of enshittification of the platform. The lesson to learn that many continue failing at is relying on a platform, only to have it turn to crap once VC money is part of the calculus (certain parties will push for their ROI) where you as a user, then need to decide to stay or go where if it is the latter, will need to waste energy rebuilding again. This makes self-hosting or an ActivityPub presence look more attractive where you remain in control (Bluesky’s ATprotocol is still in the process of going through the IETF for standardization). It’s why I decided to go back to self-hosting again and consciously self de-platforming.
