Bluesky Secures $8 Million in Seed Funding to Launch Paid Service
While attention is focused on the highly anticipated launch of the Instagram-driven Threads platform, Bluesky, one of its competitors, has made significant progress unnoticed. Bluesky recently revealed that it has successfully secured seed round funding, with a total of $8 million raised during the summer. Moreover, the platform, supported by Jack Dorsey, has introduced its inaugural paid service, allowing users to have personalized domains as their usernames on the platform.
Announcing in a blog post, Bluesky stated, “We raised $8 million in a seed round led by Neo, a community-driven company with incredible partners like Ali Partovi and Suzanne Xie, and an amazing group of other investors, including Joe Beda, who co-created Kubernetes, Bob Young Red Hatista, Amjad Masad (Replit), Amir Shevat, Heather Meeker, Jeromy Johnson, Automattic, Protocol Labs, Sarah Drasner, Katelyn Donnelly, Ali Evans, Stav Erez, Kris Nova, Brad Fitzpatrick, Abdul Ly and many others”.
Bluesky also revealed that it began raising funds after converting from a non-profit LLC to a non-profit C Corp “to gain more independence.”
The post revealed how the company plans to use the fund, stating, “This funding will allow us to expand our team, manage growing operational and infrastructure costs, and grow the AT Protocol ecosystem and the Bluesky app.”
Bluesky announces its first paid service
Funding for the seed round was not the only thing announced in the message. Bluesky also launched its first paid service where it plans to offer custom domains to end users. Custom domains were first announced in March, when Bluesky promoted them as a way to find authentic accounts and something they could keep even if they left the platform.
In its message, the company said it doesn’t want to rely heavily on ads because it encourages locking in users and turning them into a product. It called itself a public social network with open source code, but said it didn’t have any user data and as a result had to look to paid services to generate revenue.
“Over 13,000 users have already either reused domains they own as handlers or bought a domain exclusively thanks to Bluesky. Domains have so much potential as a personal way to shape identity and a decentralized way to secure reputation that builds off of an existing network,” it added.
