Latest news with #Graze
Malaysian Reserve
25-04-2025
- Business
- Malaysian Reserve
Graze Robotics Partners with Invited to Launch Autonomous Mowing Pilot at Gleneagles Country Club
DALLAS, April 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Graze Robotics, a leader in autonomous mowing technology, is proud to announce a strategic partnership with Invited (formerly ClubCorp), the largest owner and operator of private golf and country clubs in North America. This collaboration will introduce Graze's innovative robotic mowing solutions to Gleneagles Country Club in Dallas, TX, as part of a groundbreaking pilot program running through 2025. This initiative marks a significant step in the evolution of golf course maintenance, leveraging cutting-edge robotics to optimize turf management while enhancing sustainability and operational efficiency. The pilot will focus on demonstrating the capabilities of Graze's robotic mowers in maintaining the rough and fairways, key areas that demand precision, consistency, and efficiency in high-end golf course operations. 'We are always seeking innovative solutions that enhance the quality and sustainability of our course management practices,' said David Pillsbury, CEO of Invited. 'Graze's technology represents an exciting advancement in how we can maintain pristine playing conditions while reducing our environmental footprint. We look forward to seeing the impact of this partnership at Gleneagles.' Graze's autonomous mowers offer numerous benefits, including lower fuel consumption and consistent course conditions—all while contributing to environmental sustainability through electric-powered operation. The pilot at Gleneagles will provide critical insights into how robotic mowing can complement and enhance traditional maintenance practices. 'Our partnership with Invited is a testament to the growing demand for intelligent automation in golf course management,' said Logan Fahey Franz, Chief Executive Officer of Graze Robotics. 'Gleneagles provides the perfect environment to showcase the capabilities of our technology, and we're excited to demonstrate how robotic mowing can help elevate course conditions while optimizing labor and resource efficiency.' As the pilot progresses, Graze and Invited will collaborate closely to evaluate performance metrics, refine operational strategies, and explore opportunities for broader deployment across Invited's extensive network of premier golf courses. For more information about Graze Robotics and its autonomous mowing solutions, visit Media Contact:Francie Holmes fholmes@ 972.598.9753 About Graze Robotics: Graze Robotics is a pioneering company in autonomous mowing solutions, specializing in sustainable and efficient robotic technology for large-scale landscaping and golf course maintenance. About Invited: Since its founding in 1957, Dallas-based Invited has operated with the mission of Building Relationships and Enriching Lives®. The leading owner-operator of membership golf and country clubs and city clubs in North America, Invited is relentless in its pursuit of providing extraordinary experiences, meaningful connections, shared passions, and memorable moments for approximately 350,000 members. The company's mission is supported by nearly 20,000 peak-season employees and a portfolio of over 160 owned or operated golf and country clubs and city clubs in 26 states. Invited creates communities that cater to an aspirational lifestyle through its championship golf courses, workspaces, handcrafted cuisine, resort-style pools, tennis and pickleball facilities, golf lounges, fitness centers, and pioneering programming.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Graze Raises $1M to Take Back Social Media from Algorithmic Control
Backed by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, Graze Puts Users in Charge of Their FeedsPORTLAND, Ore., April 16, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Social media has long been dictated by opaque algorithms, but Graze is proving there's another way. Today, the company announced $1 million in pre-seed funding to fuel its mission of empowering users to create and control their own social media feeds on Bluesky. Instead of being force-fed content by traditional platforms, individuals and organizations can now build their own custom feeds — taking back control from algorithm-driven gatekeeping. The round was led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, with additional backing from Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs. 'Betaworks has long been a backer of and believer in the open web and Graze represents a huge step forward in making social media a more open, user-controlled environment,' said Jordan Crook, partner at Betaworks. 'Together with Bluesky, the Graze team is building a participatory social media culture where feeds are created, curated, and consumed by individual users.' 'At Graze, we're committed to dismantling the restrictive barriers of traditional social media platforms,' said Peat Bakke, CEO and co-founder of Graze. "By leveraging open infrastructure, we're empowering users to curate their own content experiences, ensuring they have the autonomy to shape their social media interactions according to their preferences.' A New Era of Social Media is Taking Shape Journalists and news outlets are leaving traditional social media in large numbers, seeking better platforms to share their stories. The Guardian, for example, stopped posting on X over concerns about harmful content and has turned to Bluesky instead. The shift is already having a tangible impact—traffic from Bluesky to The Guardian's website is now twice that of Threads, and nearly 1 million people have accessed news directly through feeds created on the Graze platform. The trend is clear: both journalists and readers are moving toward independent, user-driven platforms. "Graze is already showing real traction on Bluesky. Their success highlights that people want meaningful control over their social feeds," said Rose Wang, COO of Bluesky. Since its launch in November 2024, Graze has delivered curated content to approximately 1.8 million Bluesky users, representing a significant portion of the platform's active user base. This rapid adoption highlights the growing demand for personalized, algorithm-free content experiences. Empowering Media and Content Creators Graze equips media brands and content creators with the tools they need to take back control of how their content is distributed and consumed. With Graze, they can: Boost Visibility – Custom feeds ensure content reaches targeted audiences, increasing engagement. Maintain Editorial Integrity – Full control over feeds allows creators to align content with their brand's voice and values. Access In-Depth Analytics – Data-driven insights help optimize content strategies based on real audience interactions. Fueling Developer Innovation on Bluesky Graze also empowers developers by offering flexible tools to build and customize new experiences on Bluesky, including: No-Code Feed Creation – A visual editor enables quick, custom feed design without complex coding. Advanced Content Filtering – Support for complex logic combinations allows for fine-tuned content curation. Real-Time Updates – Instant feed updates ensure users always get the most current content. The Future of Social Media is Built for Users, Not Billionaires 'Social media shouldn't be controlled by billionaires, it should belong to the people," said Devin Gaffney, CTO and co-founder of Graze. "We've moved beyond the outdated, closed-platform model by embracing an open-source ecosystem that puts users and creators in control. The future of social media is about transparency, choice, and giving people the power to shape their own experience.' As Bluesky continues to gain momentum, Graze is committed to accelerating its growth, with a vision to help Bluesky reach 100 million users by the end of the year. By prioritizing openness, autonomy, and user-driven content, Graze is reshaping the future of social media, one feed at a time. About GrazeGraze enables users to create custom feeds on Bluesky, providing tools that allow individuals and organizations to design and control their social media experience. By offering sophisticated building blocks akin to those used by major social media companies, Graze empowers users to curate content that aligns with their interests and values. Committed to transparency and user empowerment, Graze is redefining how people interact with social media. For more information, visit Media Contact: Juliet TravisLiftoff Communicationsjuliet@ A photo accompanying this announcement is available at
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention
A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors' attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. In other words, Graze has stumbled upon a potentially viable business model for Bluesky before the social network itself has. Investors are taking notice, too: Graze is poised to announce the close of an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding. "I've been doing tech startups for 30 years and this is actually the craziest early-stage growth curve I've ever seen," says Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke, speaking to the tool's adoption. "We went from zero — literally no traffic — to serving hundreds of thousands of unique people every day, tens of millions of content impressions. It's nuts. It's totally nuts. And it's all word of mouth." Bakke is joined by co-founder Devin Gaffney, whose background is in social media and network analysis. The two began working together around 12 years ago on Little Bird, a social data analysis startup that relied on parsing Twitter's full feed, also known as the "Firehose," to extract insights that could be useful to businesses. Now, they're working with the new generation's firehose: the "Jetstream" offered by the open and decentralized social network Bluesky, which includes all the public posts from its now over 30.3 million users as well as future apps building on the underlying AT Protocol (or atproto, for short). "We've always been interested in social networks, especially the nascent, growing social networks, to see what's happening next," Bakke says. Following the events that drove millions to leave X to join Bluesky over the past year (and in even larger numbers after the U.S. presidential elections), the two founders seized the opportunity to start working in this space again. In November, they began building Graze, a tool that gives Bluesky users the ability to "create their own algorithm," so to speak, in the form of custom feeds built with complex logic, multiple filters, and rules. And its tools have rapidly taken off. Graze's growth is being helped by Bluesky's increasing popularity; the network added 23 million users over the past year. Though Bluesky looks and feels much like X (formerly Twitter), with its text-first nature, timeline, and DMs, it's offering a more democratized experience than traditional social networks. Instead of being centrally managed by a billionaire owner like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, anyone can run their own Bluesky Personal Data Server and set their own moderation controls. They can also build their own custom feeds to filter the network's content in a variety of ways, instead of only relying on Bluesky's algorithm. Graze operates on Bluesky's Jetstream and works with atproto allowing people to build not just feeds, but also their own websites and experiences based on their filtered versions of the Jetstream. For instance, one Graze customer is building a social media platform focused on professional cycling. With Graze's toolset, the customer can create different algorithms that identify and track specific teams and people, and also moderate the feed so it's "safe for work." It's also the tool that built top Bluesky feeds like News and BookSky. Several of the apps building their own "TikTok for Bluesky"-type video experiences are working with Graze's toolset, too. What's potentially more interesting is that Graze is one of the only platforms working to monetize these custom Bluesky feeds, and it's doing it with the Bluesky team's blessing. The startup has already quietly tested sponsored posts via its platform, which loads ads into custom feeds. (Because Bluesky doesn't have a way of differentiating ads in its product, these posts use a hashtag to flag themselves as ads.) "Temu can't just come in and buy like $100,000 of advertising on [someone's] news feed," Bakke says. Instead, an advertiser offers a sponsored post and the number of impressions they're aiming for. "The feed operator has to consent to it. They maintain 100% editorial control over what goes into their feed." Plus, he says, if someone overruns their feed with ads, the users will likely abandon it. "So, there's a natural ecosystem balancing process," he says. The ads can be set at whatever price point the feed's creator chooses. Initially, Graze's guidance is a $1 to $3 CPM rate. That's a quarter of what it costs to advertise on other social networks, but so far, the click-through rates and engagement are comparable, he says. Graze also respects Bluesky's existing privacy guidelines — meaning the ads are not targeted by collecting users' personal data and or demographic info, but rather by which feeds the advertiser wants to reach. (Presumably, a cat food brand would do well advertising in a feed focused on cats, for example.) Other Graze tools will soon allow for private feeds, including those that require a subscription payment to access. With both ads and subscriptions, Graze is eyeing a 30/70 revenue split, similar to the App Store, with creators taking the larger share. It will also work with brands and businesses to match them to feeds that would best serve their interests via a creator marketplace, launching next week. Portland-based Graze is currently a team of three, including front-end developer Andrew Lazowski, based in San Jose. Sign in to access your portfolio
