Graze, a startup that allows users to create and monetize custom feeds on Bluesky's social network, has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures. This investment will enable the company to further develop its platform, which gives 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 other social networks like X or Meta's Threads, where users are defaulted into a main algorithmic feed, 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 non-developers, which 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, 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, including 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. The company is now 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. 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, according to Graze's founders.

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."

Meanwhile, users on traditional big tech platforms don't have any way to opt out of seeing ads. Graze lets feed operators choose whether they want to run ads and gives them editorial control over what's being sponsored. It also lets a feed's users opt out of ads by blocking sponsored hashtags. The team points out that feed operators are incentivized to let things get to that point of having users block ads or leave the feed by not overrunning their feeds with ads in the first place.

Currently, 200 feeds built with Graze are running ads at a cost of around $1 per 1,000 impressions. But the team expects that number to grow as Bluesky itself scales. Graze takes a 30% cut of the ad dollars, which allows the company to handle not only the hosting and payment processing but also the software for feed creation and management, including for feeds that don't monetize.

Further down the road, the team is considering doing a revenue share with Bluesky and other apps built on its underlying technology, the AT Protocol (ATProto). Today, Graze is working with other Bluesky ATProto-based apps, including photo and video apps like Skylight, Spark, and Flashes. "We're very interested in figuring out what is the ethical revenue sharing model that helps everyone involved in the picture, including app developers," said Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke.

The pre-seed round of $1 million was led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, with additional funding from Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs. The funds will give Graze time to find product-market fit, the team told TechCrunch. "Right now, we are not focused on revenue — I mean, we already have revenue," Bakke said. "We're focused on discovery, learning … how do we make this a great experience for everyone, and build relationships in the space?"

In addition to Portland-based Gaffney and Bakke, Graze's third co-founder, Andrew Lisowski, who built the front end, is based in San Jose. A small handful of part-time employees also help with coding, communication, documentation, and community management.

The investment in Graze marks a significant milestone in the development of Bluesky's social network, which is built on the AT Protocol. As the platform continues to grow, Graze's innovative approach to feed creation and monetization is likely to play a key role in shaping the future of social media advertising.