Graze, a startup that lets people build and monetize custom feeds for Bluesky’s social network, has attracted new capital. Pre-seed investors, led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, have invested $1 million in the company’s small team, which is working to give users control over their algorithms and social media experiences.
Graze’s software, available via the web, offers tools to build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds. Unlike on other social networks like X or Meta’s Threads, where users are defaulted into a main algorithmic feed every time they open the app, Bluesky’s growing social network of nearly 35 million users allows anyone to create and follow custom feeds, pin them to the app’s navigation, and make any one of them their preferred home feed.
However, feed creation can be a complicated process for nondevelopers.
That inspired the team at Graze to create software that lets people more easily build custom feeds using templates and other tools for managing their feeds’ moderation, their logic and filters, sort order, and the social graph a feed contains.
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.
This setup also gives advertisers more power, Graze’s founders believe.
In a traditional advertising environment, a social network like Facebook or X decides whose attention you are purchasing, said Graze co-founder and CTO Devin Gaffney.
“Advertisers have very little control over where their content is seen and the quality of how that is rendered to people,” he said. “They don’t have any real relationship with the audience. And the decision as to how [the ad] gets shown to people is systematically against their favor.”
