However, they ended talks with Microsoft, opting to stay independent. The same month, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal reported that several companies were looking to purchase Discord, with Microsoft named as the likely lead buyer at a value estimated at $10 billion. Discord doubled its monthly user base to about 140 million in 2020. An inside source called this one of the first steps for the company towards a potential initial public offering, though co-founder and chief executive officer Jason Citron had stated earlier in the month he was not thinking about taking the company public. In March 2021, Discord announced it had hired its first finance chief, former head of finance for Pinterest Tomasz Marcinkowski. The company announced it had received an additional $100 million in investments to help with these changes. Among other planned changes was to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it used within the client, improving the user onboarding experience, and increasing server capacity and reliability. Starting in June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specifically to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions, revealing its new slogan 'Your place to talk', along with a revised website. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners. In December 2018, the company announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. Microsoft announced in April 2018 that it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users, allowing them to link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts so that they can connect with their Xbox Live friends list through Discord. In 2019, WarnerMedia Investment Group was shut down and acquired by AT&T, selling its equity.

In January 2016, Discord raised an additional $20 million in funding, including an investment from WarnerMedia (then TimeWarner). The company benefited from relationships with Twitch streamers and subreddit communities for Diablo and World of Warcraft. Discord became widely used by esports and LAN tournament gamers. According to Citron, they made no specific moves to target any specific audience, but some gaming-related subreddits quickly began to replace their IRC links with Discord links. ĭiscord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name. To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb's 9+ incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent. In addition, 'Discord in the gaming community' was the problem they wished to solve. The name Discord was chosen because it 'sounds cool and has to do with talking', was easy to say, spell, remember, and was available for trademark and website. This led to the development of a chat service with a focus on user friendliness with minimal impact on performance. Īccording to Citron, during the development process, he 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. Their first product was Fates Forever, released in 2014, which Citron anticipated to be the first MOBA game on mobile platforms, but it did not become commercially successful. Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games, and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who had founded Guildwork, another social gaming platform. As of September 2023, Discord is the 35th most visited website in the world with 23.42% of its traffic coming from the United States.

It is primarily used by gamers, although the share of users interested in other topics is growing. As of 2021, the service has over 350 million registered users and over 150 million monthly active users. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, and in web browsers. A server is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice channels which can be accessed via invite links. Communication can be private or take place in virtual communities called 'servers'. VoIP communications, instant messaging, videoconferences, content delivery, and social mediaĭiscord is an instant messaging and VoIP social platform which allows communication through voice calls, video calls, text messaging, and media and files. English (UK/US), Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Cool discord server icon