By
Darya Rudz
March 21st, 2023
Growing instant messaging and VoIP startup, Discord has secured a $100 million venture capital funding from Index Ventures. Now it is valued at $3.5 billion.
The story of Discord and its subsequent metamorphosis into a world-renowned app remains a source of inspiration to investors and market observers. The app was founded as an all-in-one social communication app for gaming, book clubs, and community meetups. Since it was founded in 2015, the app has grown its user base to over 300 million, making it one of the most widely used social media apps around. Moreover, now its valuation reached $3.5 billion.
Discord has reinvented itself after being used as the meetup place by white supremacists. The racist group Alt-Right organized the Charlottesville protest that was marred with numerous mishaps as reported by the New York Times. Since then, the Discord platform further gained popularity in the wake of the coronavirus where students rely on the app to organize study groups. In contrast to Discord’s early allowance, the platform is now being used to further the agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement as it’s the home of such groups as Black Nerds and others.
Discord’s Early Beginnings
The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy in 2015 under the domain name discordapp.com. During Discord’s early development process, Citron noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends using available voice over IP (VoIP) software. He found that some VoIP options required players to type in IP addresses just to connect, while others were resource-heavy and had known security problems. This led the developers to create a chat service that was much friendlier to use and based on more modern technology. According to Citron, the only area that they pushed Discord into was for the Reddit communities, finding that many subreddit forums were replacing IRC servers with Discord ones. Discord became popular among esports and LAN tournament gamers, and other Twitch streamers.
Discord Has a Constantly Growing Valuation
Discord is currently valued at $3.5 billion and the company’s valuation journey has been that of a consistent rise. The founder Jason Citron sold his company OpenFeint back in 2011 for $104 million and used the proceeds to establish Hammer and Chisel, a game development studio under which the current Discord Inc is founded.
The increasing popularity of Discord Inc has attracted investors particularly Index Ventures co-founded by Danny Rimer. It invested in Discord’s 2018 fundraising and is injecting a new $100 million venture funding into the rising social media app at a $3.5 billion valuation, up from $2.05 billion 18 months ago.
Rimer wrote in a statement:
“I believe Discord is the future of platforms because it demonstrates how a responsibly curated site can provide a safe space for people with shared interests. Rather than throwing raw content at you, like Facebook, it provides a shared experience for you and your friends. We’ll come to appreciate that Discord does for social conversation what Slack has done for professional conversation.”
In all, Discord has a lot more promotion to do to establish itself as a new generation communication tool beyond the shores of the United States and countries where its usage is dominant.
