Discord

Discord operates a communications platform where users organize into servers with voice, video and text channels, originally built for people playing video games together. Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy launched it in May 2015 out of their earlier company, Hammer & Chisel, a game studio; the corporate entity is now Discord Inc. and is based in San Francisco. Citron led the company as CEO until April 2025, when Humam Sakhnini took over and Citron moved to the board as an advisor. Vishnevskiy remains CTO. Discord reports more than 200 million monthly active users as of 2025 and around 19 million weekly active servers in 2024.

Early backing came from the YouWeb 9+ incubator, Benchmark and Tencent. Discord raised $20 million in January 2016. In December 2018 it raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round led by Greenoaks Capital, with FirstMark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners participating; its Form D for that offering lists a first sale date of December 21, 2018. SEC filings show further equity sales of about $100 million beginning June 2020, about $100 million beginning December 2020, about $104 million beginning June 2021 (Sony Interactive Entertainment invested in 2021), and a fully sold $500 million offering beginning September 2021, which coincided with a reported $15 billion valuation. A smaller $15.7 million equity sale was recorded in January 2023.

Discord has not completed an exit. It reported $130 million of revenue in 2020, triple 2019's level, and the company says it had more than 90 million daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2025. In mid January 2026 Discord confidentially filed for an initial public offering with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan as banks. As of this writing there is no public S-1 on EDGAR and no ticker, so no listing date or IPO price has been set.

Discord shows the long private holding period common to consumer platforms of its vintage. Benchmark and Tencent entered at the seed stage in 2015; Greenoaks and the 2018 syndicate entered at $2 billion; and the 2021 investors paid a $15 billion price at the top of the venture market. More than a decade after founding, none of those positions has been realized through a public market, and the eventual IPO valuation will determine whether the late 2021 money sees a gain.