If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. With startups, it’s all about timing. And Portland startup Graze seems to be timing their effort exceptionally well. The company focuses on building tools that allow users to create custom feeds of Bluesky content to which other Bluesky users can subscribe. As an added feature, there’s also the option of including promotional posts and paid advertisements among the stream of updates in the feed. And now, Graze has $1 million of runway to keep building out the concept.
Today, Graze powers 4,500 Bluesky feeds created by around 3,000 users. This includes several top feeds on Bluesky’s social network, like the News feed, the Booksky feed, and others across a range of topics like gaming, art, politics, sports, fitness, hobbies, and more. It also powers the news tracking service Sill and feeds in other apps outside of Bluesky.
Now, Graze is taking the next step beyond feed creation and management by allowing creators to monetize their feeds via advertising.
The approach here is to establish a more ethical framework for advertising compared with the ad tech systems that big tech companies use today. That is, instead of collecting user data for ad targeting purposes, advertisers on Graze select the feeds where they want their ads to appear. The feed’s topic gives them an idea about the demographic they’d reach, and the feed operators get to choose which ads appear in their feeds, how often, and at what cost to advertisers.
The round was led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures. Additional investors and angels also participated in the round.
For more information, see “Bluesky feed builder Graze raises $1M, rolls out ads.” GeekWire covered the news, as well.
[Full disclosure: Graze cofounders Devin Gaffney and Peat Bakke are PIE alums. I am the cofounder and general manager of PIE. I am also an investor in Graze.]
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