Social app Bluesky, widely touted as a potential rival to X, has raised $15 million in its Series A round. This follows an $8m tranche of seed funding secured last year. The new cash injection comes at a time of strong growth for the platform, which has added around 3 million new users in the last month, some of which have migrated from X. At last count, Bluesky’s total user base was around 13 million.
Announcing the raise, Bluesky’s leadership said: “With this fundraise, we will continue supporting and growing Bluesky’s community, investing in Trust and Safety, and supporting the ATmosphere developer ecosystem. In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customisations like colours and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.”
Of note to the creator community, Bluesky said: “We’re proud of our vibrant community of creators, including artists, writers, developers, and more, and we want to establish a voluntary monetisation path for them as well. Part of our plan includes building payment services for people to support their favourite creators and projects.”
Bluesky said its open technology, the AT Protocol, makes an ecosystem of apps possible. “We’re excited that developers have begun building their own applications with totally different purposes from the Bluesky app. For example, Smoke Signal is an events app, Frontpage is a web forum, and Bluecast is an audio app (that includes karaoke with licensed songs). We hypothesise that monetisation strategies like subscriptions, domain-name registrations, and payments to creators will enable these apps to grow as well.”
While Bluesky was launched out of the US, the company said it has also “welcomed millions of people from Brazil, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and more”.
Pictured above is CEO Jay Graber.
