Flipboard acquires Graze to put paid, user-built feeds at the heart of the open social web

Flipboard has acquired Graze, a two-person Portland startup that builds tools for creating and monetizing feeds on Bluesky and other apps built on the AT Protocol. The deal, announced Wednesday and reported by TechCrunch, is the latest in a series of bets the news-magazine company has placed on the open social web — the loose umbrella term for platforms where users, rather than a single company, control their own data and audience. Terms were not disclosed, though TechCrunch describes it as a small deal: Graze had raised just $1 million at the start of 2025.

What Graze built

Graze provides tools to build, customize, publish and manage Bluesky feeds — curated streams of posts that users can set as their home feed, pin for quick access, or pull into any other application built on Bluesky's AT Protocol, the open technical standard that lets different apps share the same underlying network. According to figures the company shared with TechCrunch, Graze has delivered more than 41 billion posts to roughly 12 million people in the 21 months since launching, hosts more than 7,000 feeds, and currently monetizes about 60% of its traffic.

Ads without the tracking

The monetization model is what caught Flipboard's attention. Ads sold into feeds are contextual rather than behavioral: a brand that wants to reach game developers buys a placement in a feed run by members of that community, and the feed's curator picks which ads run. There is no cross-site tracking of individual users — the approach open-social-web advocates call the "surveillance ecosystem." Revenue is split 70/30, with the majority going to the feed's creator.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, speaking to TechCrunch, argued the model shows advertising "doesn't have to surveil anybody" or "violate people's privacy," and noted that "all the economics aren't just going to one player" — the ad revenue "is being shared with the feed builder."

Why the two companies merged

The partnership grew out of Flipboard's new app Surf, which had been using Graze's feed-building technology. According to TechCrunch, the collaboration revealed that the two companies shared a vision for the open social ecosystem while duplicating each other's work. Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney concluded the startup could move faster with a partner that already had the infrastructure it lacked — in particular, Flipboard's existing relationships with advertisers.

In his own announcement, Gaffney wrote that Graze's tiny team was stretched thin across roles it hadn't anticipated, and that joining Flipboard would let it seize the open social moment. He described the combined companies as "two halves of one machine": Surf as "the browser for the open social web," where people read and discover feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, RSS and more, and Graze as "the engine under those feeds," where a curator builds, tunes and monetizes a feed without writing a line of code.

What happens next

Flipboard will continue using Graze's technology and let its users build feeds themselves, expanding beyond Bluesky to anything running on the AT Protocol, Flipboard's own app included. Graze says its product is not going away and that existing users and their readers will see expanded capacity rather than a shutdown.

McCue also framed the opportunity in terms of communities rather than protocols. Many feed builders are running communities whose members never think about which network they are joining: as he put it to TechCrunch, they don't think "I'm joining Bluesky" — they think "I'm joining The Tea because 'I care about women's sports,'" referencing a feed from a Surf community called Bet on Her.

Why it matters

The open social web has largely worked out infrastructure and identity; sustainable revenue for the people doing the curating is the missing piece. If contextual ads can pay independent feed builders without tracking readers, Graze offers a template for funding decentralized platforms that does not simply replicate the economics of the incumbents. Gaffney's stated thesis goes further: the algorithm is "a platform's crown jewel," and handing feed-building tools to everyone is an attempt to diffuse that power — what he calls an "attention economy without kings." Both he and McCue argue that as generative AI floods legacy platforms, human curation becomes the scarcest and most durable layer of the attention economy. Flipboard is now putting money behind that thesis.