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. In 2019 they sold their share after WarnerMedia Investment Group was shut down following the AT&T acquisition. This included an investment from American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate WarnerMedia. The company raised an additional US$20 million in funding for the software in January 2016. Discord became popular among esports and LAN tournament gamers, and other Twitch streamers. According to Citron, the only area that they pushed Discord into was for the Reddit communities, finding that many subreddit forums were replacing IRC servers with Discord ones. 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.ĭiscord opened a public beta on March 6 2015.ĭiscord was publicly released in May 2015 under the URL. This led the developers to develop a chat service that was much friendlier to use and based on more modern technology. He found that some VoIP options required players to type in IP addresses just to connect, while others were resource-heavy and had known security problems.

However, during the development process, Citron 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. He eventually 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.

Discord on the web