Born in 2015 from the imagination of Jason Citron (yes, like the fruit) and Stanislav Vishnevskiy (two video game enthusiasts who imagined a better chat platform for video games), Discord is a software whose objective was to bring together all the VoIP existing on the market such as Skype, TeamSpeak, Mumble, etc. Used mainly by the gaming community, the software will quickly interest other people such as developers and the latest news, 250 million users were identified in July 2019.
But the firm founded by Jason Citron obviously does not want to stop there and confirms the rumors that have emerged 3 weeks ago: Discord has indeed carried out a new fundraising of 100 million dollars, which brings to 200 million dollars total funds raised in less than 6 months. With such a powerful move, the company’s valuation is now estimated at $ 7 billion, or double in the space of a year, since in 2019, Discord was estimated at around $ 3.5 billion.
This is the site TechCrunch which brings the news after having obtained confirmation from Discord, and specifies that the amount of funds raised by the start-up based in San Francisco is supported in particular by other large groups such as Tencent (the Chinese giant), Index Ventures, Greylock, IVP and Spark Capital. If Discord remains vague on the use of this funding, it is explained that it is to make the software better.
However, it should be noted that Discord has a different business model which is not geared towards advertising but through a subscription system, called “Nitro”, which allows its users to take advantage of bonuses and new features such as, file sharing (up to 50MB – compared to 8MB normally), the possibility of uploading avatars in animated GIF format, the use of personalized emojis on all servers and finally a special profile badge. This Nitro system costs $ 4.99 per month and had around one million subscribers as of June 2020, a figure that has arguably increased with containment and notably the explosion of the game Among Us, by far the most popular game in those months when the whole planet was stuck at home. Joy.
