Bluesky:

In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to meet the rapid growth of both the AT Protocol (atproto) and Bluesky app. We’re excited to share more as we move into a new era of leadership and further growth.

This raise was led by Bluesky founder Jay Graber, who recently transitioned to Chief Innovation Officer to focus on building the future of open social infrastructure.

I didn’t post about Graber’s stepping aside as CEO earlier this month because I didn’t make much of it. I’ve been bullish on Bluesky since its inception, but I haven’t been thrilled by it of late. I don’t think it’s gotten any worse, but its growth has stalled, leaving it in the limbo between ghost town and boom town. For many products/services/businesses/publications, a sustained popularity that’s less than booming is fine. Niches can work, or thrive even. Daring Fireball is clearly a niche publication. But for social networks, two decades of evidence suggests that anything less than booming is a problem.

But what the hell are we to make of a $100 million funding round that wasn’t announced for 11 months? Is this commonplace, and I just somehow never before took note of a company keeping a large funding round secret for a year? Or is this as weird as I’m thinking it is? I always thought big funding rounds were things companies wanted to immediately promote, not hide. This roundup of links at Techmeme suggests I’m not alone.

Update, 2 hours later: The explanation I’ve now heard, from a source in a good position to have an informed take, is that it is unusual. But basically it’s a unique series of events, at a unique time (post–2024 election, when Bluesky experienced a nice surge), for a unique company. So: weird, yes. Cause for alarm, probably not.

Second update: Interesting thread with Adam Vartanian, on Bluesky (natch), where he states:

If you see press reports that says a company “has raised” some money but no date on when the round closed, it probably happened some time in the past. Bluesky is actually unusual in disclosing a date that’s so far in the past.

I kept thinking that I must be missing something, and this feels like it must be exactly that something. If true, it’s not unusual for a company to announce a seeding round long after it closed. What’s unusual in this case with Bluesky is that when they finally did announce it, they revealed the date it closed, too. That it was, in fact, an act of transparency, at least in comparison to many other venture-backed companies today.