Flipboard is acquiring Graze, a Portland-based startup building feed tools for the open social web, TechCrunch reports. Graze confirmed the move in its own announcement, saying it is “joining Flipboard” to expand work on user-run social algorithms and feed monetization. The deal centers on a specific layer of social infrastructure: who controls the feed. Graze gives users tools to build, customize, publish, and manage feeds, currently focused on Bluesky feeds that can be used as home feeds, pinned for quick access, or pulled into apps built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol. TechCrunch describes AT Protocol as an open standard that lets different apps share the same social network. Graze says its product has reached meaningful scale for a young infrastructure company. In 21 months, the company says it has sent more than 41 billion posts to about 12 million people, a figure cited both in Graze’s own post and in TechCrunch’s report. TechCrunch also reports that Graze has north of 7,000 feeds on its platform, with around 60% of its traffic monetized. The monetization model is the most commercially important part of the acquisition. According to TechCrunch, Graze’s ads are contextual rather than based on tracking individual users across the web. A brand trying to reach game developers, for example, can buy placement in a feed run by that community, and the curator can choose which ads to run. TechCrunch reports that ad revenue is split 70/30, with the majority going to the feed creator. That gives Flipboard a way to pair distribution with feed-level economics. TechCrunch reports that Flipboard had already been using Graze’s feed-building technology in Surf, its app for discovering feeds across the open social web. Graze’s announcement describes Surf as the browser for open social feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, RSS, and more, while positioning Graze as the engine for building, tuning, and monetizing feeds without writing code. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch the appeal is that Graze’s ad technology does not need to surveil users or violate privacy, and that the economics are shared with feed builders rather than flowing to one platform owner. Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney, in the company’s post, said the smaller team had been slowed by operational demands and saw overlap with infrastructure Flipboard had already built. For existing Graze users, the immediate message is continuity. Graze said its mission is unchanged and that its product is not going away. TechCrunch reports that after the acquisition, Flipboard will continue using Graze’s technology and will let users build feeds themselves, with expansion beyond the Bluesky app to services running on AT Protocol, including Flipboard’s own app. The cluster does not provide financial terms or a purchase price. What it does establish is that Flipboard is buying a feed-building and monetization layer at a moment when open social products are trying to prove they can support creators and communities without recreating the centralized advertising systems they are reacting against. Who benefits: Flipboard gets Graze’s feed-building and monetization technology for Surf and its broader open social strategy. Feed curators on Graze could benefit if Flipboard’s advertiser relationships and infrastructure expand the revenue opportunity TechCrunch describes. Who's exposed: The reports do not establish direct competitive impact. The clearest pressure is on open social feed tools that lack monetization features or distribution through apps such as Surf.