Chat App Discord Is Close To A $7 Billion Valuation—Roughly Doubling In Value In Less Than A Year

Discord could close a new funding round before the end of the year, targeting an approximately $7 billion valuation, a source familiar with the matter says.

The exact terms of the financing are still in flux, but the new $7 billion price tag would mean Discord had doubled its valuation in less than a year. In June, the chat app got $100 million at an estimated $3.5 billion valuation. A Discord spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Discord has seen a spike in popularity as the world has endured coronavirus lockdown. The chat app resembles a blend of Slack and Reddit with free text-, voice- and video-messaging features. Through June, Discord had 300 million registered users, quadruple the number from two years ago. Monthly active users, meanwhile, had reached about 100 million, a 50% rise in a year.

Discord was founded in 2014 by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, two video games enthusiasts who envisioned a better platform for chatting and playing games. (The pair’s stakes in the company would likely exceed $700 million each if the company successfully captures the new $7 billion valuation.) Discord for much of its life has mostly been a cult-favorite among gamers, but in the past several years, it has been increasingly embraced by more diverse groups, including teachers and offices contending with remote education and work.

Rather than try to make money from ads, Discord has focused on growing a subscription business, offering a plan called Nitro to users interested in customizing their profiles. Nitro, which begins at $4.99 a month, had an estimated 1 million subscribers in June, a number that has presumably continued to grow as demand for Discord has picked up in the few months.

While Discord has gone increasingly mainstream, it has recently seen record daily downloads thanks to the surprise smash hit of mobile game Among Us, a murder mystery game set aboard a spaceship. Its daily downloads nearly doubled in September—when the Among Us craze first set in—to over 3.5 million, according to data from AppTopia, which monitors the app universe.