Flipboard is expanding its investment in the open social web with the acquisition of Graze, a Portland-based startup that helps people create and monetize custom social media feeds.
Graze provides tools for building, customizing, publishing and managing feeds on Bluesky. These feeds let users create curated streams of posts around specific interests and can be used as home feeds, pinned for quick access or integrated into other applications built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol.
Since launching about 21 months ago, Graze says its technology has delivered more than 41 billion posts to around 12 million people. The platform currently hosts more than 7,000 feeds, with roughly 60 percent of its traffic being monetized.
A major part of Graze’s business model is advertising. Feed creators can choose which advertisements they want to display, while brands can place ads within feeds focused on particular communities or interests. Unlike traditional targeted advertising, Graze’s system relies on context rather than tracking individual users across the internet.
For example, a company looking to reach game developers could advertise directly in a feed created for that community. The approach allows advertisers to reach a relevant audience without relying on extensive personal tracking.
Graze also shares advertising revenue with feed creators. The company keeps 30 percent while creators receive the remaining 70 percent, giving communities and individual curators a direct way to earn from the audiences they build.
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said the model demonstrates that advertising can generate revenue without relying on surveillance-based tracking. He also highlighted the fact that the money generated by the system is distributed among the different participants rather than going entirely to a single platform.
Flipboard had already been using Graze’s technology in its Surf app, which is designed to help people browse content across the open social web. Working together on Surf brought the two companies closer and revealed that they shared similar ideas about how the decentralized social ecosystem could develop.
Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney said the company could move faster by working with Flipboard, particularly because Flipboard already has established relationships with advertisers.
Following the acquisition, Flipboard plans to continue using Graze’s technology and allow users to create their own feeds. The system will eventually support not only Bluesky but other services and applications built on the AT Protocol, including Flipboard’s own products.
McCue said many people using these feeds are more interested in the communities and subjects they follow than in the underlying technology. Instead of thinking about joining a particular social network, users may simply join a community focused on something they care about, such as women’s sports.
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Flipboard has not disclosed the financial terms of the acquisition. The deal appears to be relatively small, with Graze having raised $1 million in early 2025 and operating with a team of only two people.
