- Bluesky, an alternative to X, saw a surge of users after Donald Trump was elected in November.
- The company is raising new funding that would value it around $700 million, according to three sources.
- The round is being led by Bain Capital Ventures, per the sources.
Bluesky is in the final stages of raising new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, which would value the social media company at around $700 million, according to three sources familiar with the deal.
Bluesky and Bain Capital Ventures did not respond to comment.
Bluesky officially launched less than a year ago with 3 million users and grew to 25.9 million users in 2024, according to the company. Nearly half of those new users were added during the last month and a half of the year after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, and some X users fled the platform owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk.
Bluesky last raised a $15 million Series A round in 2024 and an $8 million seed round in 2023. It’s unclear how much capital Bluesky is raising in this new round, which is still being finalized, and terms could change.
Bluesky told BI in late November it was growing so fast that it needed to add servers to keep up with demand.
“We have grown by a million users every day for the last eight days, which has blown past our projections, and so we were going to get new servers next year, but we had to fast forward that,” said Rose Wang, Bluesky’s COO.
Bluesky was originally formed in 2019 as an internal project at X, which was then known as Twitter, when founder Jack Dorsey was still CEO. Bluesky launched as a standalone Public Benefit Corporation in 2021, helmed by Jay Graber.
Dorsey resigned from Bluesky’s board of directors in 2024 and criticized the app for “literally repeating all the mistakes” of Twitter.
The new funding would challenge Bluesky to figure out how to make money. The service still has no ads, and Bluesky said in 2023 it never wants to rely on advertising to sustain its business.
“We believe that there must be better strategies to sustain social networks that don’t require selling user data for ads,” the company said in a blog post.
Bluesky’s user interface looks like a bare-bones X. Bluesky bills itself as a more utopian and safe alternative. It added many new features in 2024, including hashtags, direct messages, video sharing, and trending topics.
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