Image: © Koshiro/Stock.adobe.com
The social media platform backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey now has more than 13m users.
Bluesky, one of the main social media alternatives to X, has bagged $15m in Series A financing.
The funding round was led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda, and others.
Bluesky became one of the leading alternatives when Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk and subsequently became X. Now, the company said it has 13m users on the platform and plans to grow its network further using the fresh funding.
In an announcement, the company said Blockchain Capital shares its philosophy that use of technology should “never come at the expense of the user experience”.
“Additionally, this fund has a uniquely deep understanding of our decentralised foundation and has extensive experience building developer ecosystems, so it’s a natural partnership,” the company said.
Along with growing its community, the platform will use the funding to invest in trust and safety, support its AT protocol developer ecosystem and develop a subscription model for additional features.
“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,” the company said.
Bluesky was announced in 2019 as a Twitter-funded project that aimed to create an “open and decentralised standard for social media”. It began as an invite-only app and had more than 3m sign-ups before it went public.
The Bluesky app shares similarities with Twitter – before it became X – in terms of design and function. Users have a profile that shows their number of followers, the accounts they are following and the various posts they have created.
The challenger app then became public in February of this year. Since then, it has also enjoyed surges in engagement at X’s expense, most recently when X was banned from Brazil.
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