A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions.
In other words, Graze has stumbled upon a potentially viable business model for Bluesky before the social network itself has. Investors are taking notice, too: Graze is poised to announce the close of an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding.
“I’ve been doing tech startups for 30 years and this is actually the craziest early-stage growth curve I’ve ever seen,” says Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke, speaking to the tool’s adoption. “We went from zero — literally no traffic — to serving hundreds of thousands of unique people every day, tens of millions of content impressions. It’s nuts. It’s totally nuts. And it’s all word of mouth.”
Bakke is joined by co-founder Devin Gaffney, whose background is in social media and network analysis. The two began working together around 12 years ago on Little Bird, a social data analysis startup that relied on parsing Twitter’s full feed, also known as the “Firehose,” to extract insights that could be useful to businesses.
Now, they’re working with the new generation’s firehose: the “Jetstream” offered by the open and decentralized social network Bluesky, which includes all the public posts from its now over 30.3 million users as well as future apps building on the underlying AT Protocol (or atproto, for short).
“We’ve always been interested in social networks, especially the nascent, growing social networks, to see what’s happening next,” Bakke says.
Image Credits:Graze
Following the events that drove millions to leave X to join Bluesky over the past year (and in even larger numbers after the U.S. presidential elections), the two founders seized the opportunity to start working in this space again.
In November, they began building Graze, a tool that gives Bluesky users the ability to “create their own algorithm,” so to speak, in the form of custom feeds built with complex logic, multiple filters, and rules. And its tools have rapidly taken off.
Graze’s growth is being helped by Bluesky’s increasing popularity; the network added 23 million users over the past year.
Though Bluesky looks and feels much like X (formerly Twitt …