On Wednesday, Bluesky revealed that it secured $8 million in funding during the summer through a seed round. This financial boost will aid in advancing its goal to construct decentralized services and foster an open ecosystem.

As mentioned in the company’s announcement, Neo, a community-led firm, spearheaded Bluesky’s seed round. The company has notable partners, such as Ali Partovi, co-founder of Code.org, and Suzanne Xie, former Twitter PM. 

Numerous angel investors are included in the round, like Joe Beda who is a creator of Kubernetes, Bob Young from Red Hat, and Replit’s Amjad Masad. Also, Amir Shevat, Heather Meeker, Jeromy Johnson, Automattic, Protocol Labs, Sarah Drasner, Katelyn Donnelly, and others enthusiastically joined the round.

In March, Bluesky launched a beta version of its app on the Apple App Store for testing purposes. Following the release, the company has been diligently enhancing its features. 

Bluesky stated that the newly acquired funding will enable them to expand its team. It will effectively handle rising operational and infrastructure expenses and foster the growth of the AT Protocol ecosystem. The company recently made the protocol and client open-source to bolster this ecosystem further.

Bluesky’s First Paid Service

Bluesky has partnered with the popular domain registrar Namecheap to introduce its first paid service, which will offer custom domains. Previously, the company allowed users to set a custom domain as their handle. Over 13,000 out of its 100,000+ users have already taken advantage of this feature. However, the current method requires users to know domain registrars and DNS settings. 

The upcoming paid service aims to simplify the process by enabling users to set up a custom domain within minutes. 

In another announcement, the company reveals that the Namecheap paid service will allow users to select their desired domain name and connect it to their Bluesky account.

About Bluesky

Bluesky is a decentralized social network founded by former Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019. The company has been creating its decentralized alternative to Twitter called the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol). This protocol serves as an alternative to Mastodon, which gained popularity after Elon Musk assumed the role of Twitter’s CEO.

Bluesky utilizes the AT Protocol, which aims to facilitate public conversations. To ensure the portability of these conversations across various platforms, your data resides in openly accessible data repositories. Consequently, anyone can view the stored information. This setup lets you view posts across the entire network, regardless of your selected server. Additionally, if you decide to switch servers, you can effortlessly carry all your data along with you.