Amid Threads launch, Bluesky announces its paid service, says raised $8 mn in seed funding

Bluesky has announced that it has secured $8 million in seed funding. Alongside, it has also unveiled its first paid service offering custom domains.

Know all about Bluesky’s seed funding and its new paid service. (AP)

While the world is fixated on the big launch of the Instagram-powered Threads platform, one of its rivals Bluesky has quietly had a big day as well. It announced its seed round funding. The Jack Dorsey-backed platform shared that it has raised a total of $8 million over the summer. Additionally, the company also announced its first paid service where it will offer custom domains to those who want a unique domain as their username on the platform.

Making the announcement in a blog post, Bluesky stated, “We raised $8M in a seed round led by Neo, a community-led firm with amazing partners like Ali Partovi and Suzanne Xie, and a wonderful cast of additional investors including Joe Beda who co-created Kubernetes, Bob Young of Red Hat, Amjad Masad of 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 other operators”.

Bluesky also revealed that it began raising funds once it converted from a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corp “in order to gain more independence”.

Revealing how the company aims to spend the fund, the post stated, “With this funding, we can expand our team, manage increasing operation and infrastructure costs, and grow the AT Protocol ecosystem as well as the Bluesky app”.

Bluesky announces its first paid service

The seed round funding was not the only thing announced in the post. Bluesky also launched its first paid service where it intends to offer custom domains to end users. Custom domains were announced first in March, where Bluesky promoted it as a way to find out authentic accounts and something they can keep even if they leave the platform.

In its post, the company said that it did not want to rely heavily on advertisements as it incentivizes locking in users and making them the product. Calling itself a public social network with open source code, it said it did not hold any data of the user and as a result had to look into paid services to generate revenue.

“Over 13,000 users have already either repurposed domains they already owned to use as handles, or purchased a domain solely because of Bluesky. Domains have so much potential as a personalized way to customize identities and as a decentralized way to verify reputation that builds off the existing web,” it further added.