An inside source called this one of the first steps for the company towards a potential initial public offering, though co-founder and CEO 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 would be to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it uses 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" and a revised website. In April 2020, Discord's Twitter username was changed from to Later in May 2020, Discord changed its primary domain from to. This was part of their response to an increase in users as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Discord changed its motto from "Chat for Gamers" to "Chat for Communities and Friends", and introduced server templates. 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 raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation.
Microsoft announced in April 2018 that it will 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 sold its share as it was shut down following AT&T's acquisition of WarnerMedia. 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 switch 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. This led to the development of a chat service with a focus on user friendliness with minimal impact to 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 Vishnevsky, who had founded Guildwork, another social gaming platform.
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