Flipboard acquires feed-building startup Graze to grow the open social web

Flipboard, the news-reading app that has increasingly bet on the “open social web” — platforms that let users, rather than a single company, control their own data and audience — announced Wednesday that it’s acquiring Graze, a Portland-based startup that helps creators build, customize, and monetize feeds on Bluesky.

Graze’s tools let creators build curated post streams on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, an open standard that lets different apps share the same social network; users can set these feeds as their home feed, pin them, or pull them into other AT Protocol apps. Since launching 21 months ago, Graze has sent over 41 billion posts to some 12 million people, the company says. It now has north of 7,000 feeds on its platform, with around 60% of its traffic monetized.

Rather than relying on the data-tracking model that follows individual users across the web — what open-social-web supporters call the “surveillance ecosystem” — Graze sells contextual ads: a brand targeting game developers, for instance, can buy a placement in a feed run by that community, and the feed’s curator decides which ads to run. Ad revenue splits 70/30 with Graze, with the majority going to the feed’s creator.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch the model appealed to him because “it doesn’t have to surveil anybody, and it doesn’t have to violate people’s privacy … so that’s a really fantastic vision. And the key thing is that all the economics aren’t just going to one player.”

Flipboard had already been using Graze’s feed-building technology in its newer app, Surf, and the two companies found they were duplicating each other’s work while sharing a vision for how the open social ecosystem could grow. Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney concluded the startup could move faster by partnering with a company that already had the advertiser relationships and infrastructure it needed.

McCue said feed builders are often growing their own communities without necessarily thinking of themselves as part of a broader open-social-web movement — pointing to a Surf feed called “Bet on Her,” run by a community called The Tea, where members see themselves as following a shared interest in women’s sports rather than “joining” a particular protocol.

Post-acquisition, Flipboard will continue using Graze’s technology and let users build their own feeds across everything running on the AT Protocol — including Flipboard’s own app — not just Bluesky.

Flipboard isn’t disclosing the deal’s terms, but it was a small acquisition: Graze had raised only $1 million at the start of 2025 and has just two team members.

Why it matters

Feed curation is emerging as a business model of its own on decentralized social networks, and Flipboard’s bet suggests bigger platforms see value in owning that layer rather than just consuming it. Whether contextual, creator-controlled ads can scale past niche communities will determine whether this becomes a real alternative to surveillance-based advertising.