Discover How Portland's Graze Secured $1M to Transform Your Bluesky Experience!

Graze, a startup based in Portland, has successfully raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures. Founded less than a year ago, Graze aims to capitalize on the burgeoning platform of Bluesky by offering innovative tools that allow users to create custom feeds tailored to their interests instead of relying on algorithm-driven content curation.

The company boasts that 2.3 million people have already interacted with feeds powered by its software. Graze operates on the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol), the same decentralized framework that supports Bluesky, allowing users to own their data and social graphs, and move them across various applications.

CEO and co-founder Peat Bakke, who previously held significant engineering roles at Treasury4 and Peek, emphasizes that the platform is designed to give users autonomy over their content experiences. Bakke stated, "By leveraging open infrastructure, we’re empowering users to curate their own content experiences, ensuring they have the autonomy to shape their social media interactions according to their preferences."

Co-founder and CTO Devin Gaffney, a former machine learning engineer at Meedan, is also instrumental in Graze’s vision. The startup has attracted additional backing from Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs. As Graze continues to grow, it is exploring potential advertising revenue models to further enhance its offerings.

Bluesky itself has seen significant user growth, particularly following a surge in users migrating from X, although this growth has begun to slow down recently, with nearly 35 million users on the platform.