Graze, a startup capable of building and monetizing custom feeds for Bluesky’s social networks, has attracted new capital. The pre-seed investor, led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, has invested $1 million in the company’s small team, working to help users control their algorithms and social media experiences.
Available on the web, Graze’s software provides tools for building, customizing, publishing and managing BlueSky feeds. Unlike other social networks such as X and Meta threads, users default to the main algorithm feed each time they open an app. BlueSky’s growing social network of nearly 35 million users creates and follows custom feeds, pins them to app navigation, and makes any of them a preferred home feed.
However, creating feeds can be a complicated process for non-developers.
Inspire your Graze team, create software that makes it easier to build custom feeds using templates and other tools, and manage feed moderation, logic and filters, sort orders, and social graphs contained in Feed A.
Today, Graze Pow creates 4,500 Bluesky feeds created by around 3,000 users. This includes several top feeds on Bluesky’s social networks, including gaming, art, politics, sports, fitness, hobbies, and a variety of topics like news feeds, Booksky feeds and more. It also drives the news tracking service Sill and supplies it to other apps other than Bluesky.
Graze takes the next step beyond creating and managing feeds by allowing creators to monetize feeds through ads.
The approach here is to establish a more ethical framework for advertising compared to the ad technology systems used by large tech companies today. This means that instead of collecting user data for ad targeting purposes, Graze advertisers select the feeds they want to display their ads. The feed topic gives you an idea about the demographics they reach, and the feed operator chooses the ads that appear in the feed, the frequency, and what cost to display to the advertisers.
The set-up gives advertisers more power, the founders of Graze believe.
In a traditional advertising environment, social networks like Facebook and X decide who you are buying, said Devin Gaffney, co-founder of Graze and CTO.
“Advertisers have little control over the quality of where their content is seen and how it renders to people,” he said. “They don’t have a real relationship with their audience, and decisions about how they will be displayed to people are systematically opposed to their favor.”
Meanwhile, users of traditional, large tech platforms have no way of opting out of viewing ads.
Graze allows feed operators to choose whether to run ads or not, and have edit control over what they are sponsoring. Additionally, blocking sponsored hashtags allows feed users to opt out of ads.
The team points out that feed operators are incentivized to get things to the point of blocking ads and leaving feeds behind by not overrunning feeds with ads in the first place.
“There is a self-regulation aspect that doesn’t exist on other platforms, and operators behave in a more pro-social way,” Gaffney said.
Currently, 200 feeds built with Graze run ads at a cost of around $1 for every 1,000 impressions. However, the team hopes that the number will grow as Bluesky itself expands. Graze receives a 30% reduction in advertising dollars. This allows the company to handle not only hosting and payment processing, but also software for feed creation and management, including non-monetizing feed.
Going further, the team is considering making revenue sharing on Bluesky and other apps built on other technology, AT Protocol (Atproto). Today, Graze works with other Bluesky Atproto-based apps, including photo and video apps such as Skylight, Spark, and Flashes.
“We are very interested in understanding an ethical revenue sharing model that supports everyone involved in photography, including app developers,” said Peat Bakke, co-founder and CEO of Graze.
Graze’s $1 million previous seed round was led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, providing additional funding from Mozilla and Protocol Labs’ Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed and Angel Investors. The funding will give graze time to find a fit in the product market, the team told TechCrunch.
“Now we’re not focusing on revenue, meaning we already have revenue,” Bucke said. “We focus on discovery, learning. How do we make this a great experience for everyone and build relationships in space?”
In addition to Portland-based Gaffney and Bucket, Graze’s third co-founder, Andrew Lisowski, has built the frontend and is based in San Jose. A small number of part-time employees can also help with coding, communication, documentation and community management.