A partnership with Spotify allows friends to share their Spotify information, and playlists, and even listen to music together.The company partnered with YouTube to create a “Watch Together” feature, which enables different Discord users to view YouTube videos together.Some of these include:Ī partnership with Microsoft which allowed players to link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts, allowing them to communicate with their Xbox Live friends through Discord The total funding raised by the company was nearly $1 billion.Īside from the solid financial investment the company enjoyed, it also developed strategic partnerships to bolster its role within the industry. This involved popular companies both inside and outside the online gaming community like Sony Interactive Entertainment, Greenoaks Capital, Technology Opportunity Partners, the Dragoneer Investment Group, and so on. Other significant rounds of funding raised $150 million, $100 million, $3.3 million, $500 million, and $10.9 million. This initial funding round raised $50 million and cemented the place of Discord as a burgeoning tech company within the community. Subsequent funding for the company came through a series of funding rounds in April 2018 which attracted significant investment from well-known venture capitalists such as Tencent, Spark Capital, IVP, Index Ventures, and Benchmark. This led to the increased popularity of the platform among the community and its reputation as a “gamer” social network, with the service being used extensively during online gaming tournaments.Īs the company grew, it opened its door to funding from outside investors, including an early $20 million investment by Warner Media. This was further reinforced by the fact that they also developed a significant relationship with users of the video game live-streaming service, Twitch. According to Citron, the association between the platform and the online-gaming community developed when a subgroup of gamers on Reddit started using the platform as a chat forum. However, the name turned out to be quite fitting, since the platform was designed to solve the problem of “discord in the gaming community”.ĭespite the background of its founders and the problem they sought to solve, the company was initially not touted as a service designed specifically for the gaming community. This service was publicly launched in May 2015 and was called Discord because it apparently sounded “cool” and had “something to do with talking”. This led them to develop a pilot service, a chat service focused on creating player-centric features like usability, while still maintaining overall functionality. During the development of various projects under the company, Citron noticed specific inadequacies in the current VoIP services offered to players. Using these proceeds, he founded a game development studio named Hammer & Chisel. The idea for Discord came to Citron during the development of his next project after OpenFeint, which he sold in 2011 for $104 million. Vishnevskiy on the other hand founded Guildwork, a social network service with web hosting capabilities. Citron founded OpenFeint in 2009, a software development kit that was available on iOS and Android mobile devices and allowed players to integrate social networking features into the functionality of various games. A brief history of Discordĭiscord started off as the brainchild of Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, two seasoned veterans in the world of online gaming. Let’s take a look at the platform’s history, how the Discord business model makes money, and the platform’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and competitors. The company initially started as a niche product within the online gaming community, but has since grown to encompass an even more comprehensive range of popular communities. Discord is a social media platform which is headquartered in California and provides a wide range of communication services, such as text messaging, voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, video call services, and so on.
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