Who owns Discord? Discover Discord's ownership structure, major investors, funding history, and why Microsoft's $12B acquisition failed.
Discord, the popular communication platform beloved by gamers and communities worldwide, remains a privately held company with a fascinating ownership structure. So who owns Discord? The platform is owned by its co-founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, along with major institutional investors including Greylock Partners, Benchmark, Tencent, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Fidelity Investments. While Microsoft attempted to acquire Discord for $12 billion in 2021, the company chose to remain independent, maintaining its unique position in the communications market.
Discord operates as a private company, meaning its shares are not traded on public stock exchanges. The ownership is distributed among the founding team, employees through equity compensation, and institutional investors who participated in multiple funding rounds.
Jason Citron, the CEO and co-founder, holds a significant ownership stake in the company, though the exact percentage has not been publicly disclosed. His co-founder, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who serves as the Chief Technology Officer, also maintains substantial equity. Together, the founding team's combined ownership is estimated to be between 15-25% of the company, though this has likely diluted through successive funding rounds.
The remaining ownership is held by venture capital firms and strategic investors. Following Discord's September 2021 Series H funding round, which valued the company at $15 billion, the investor base expanded significantly. Major stakeholders include Greylock Partners, which led early funding rounds, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, and Spark Capital. Tencent Holdings invested during Discord's 2018 Series E round, acquiring a minority stake reported to be less than 5%. Sony Interactive Entertainment joined as a strategic investor in 2021, investing $100 million as part of a partnership to integrate Discord with PlayStation Network.
Institutional investors like Fidelity Investments, Franklin Templeton, and Dragoneer Investment Group participated in later-stage rounds, bringing financial expertise and stability to Discord's cap table. The company has raised over $1 billion across multiple funding rounds, creating a diverse ownership structure that balances founder control with institutional support.
Discord's origin story begins with Jason Citron's previous venture, OpenFeint, a social gaming platform he sold to Japanese gaming company GREE for $104 million in 2011. Citron then founded Hammer & Chisel in 2012, initially focused on developing a mobile game called Fates Forever. While the game failed to gain significant traction, Citron and his team noticed something interesting during development.
The team struggled to find adequate voice communication tools for gaming. Existing solutions like Skype were unreliable for gaming, TeamSpeak and Ventrilo required complex server setups, and mobile options were virtually non-existent. Citron recognized this gap represented a massive opportunity. In 2015, Hammer & Chisel pivoted entirely, transforming into Discord and building a communication platform from scratch.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who Citron met through mutual connections in the gaming industry, joined as co-founder and technical lead. Vishnevskiy's engineering expertise proved crucial in building Discord's infrastructure. The duo designed Discord to be fast, reliable, and free, with a modern interface that worked seamlessly across devices. They focused on solving real problems gamers faced, like echo cancellation, low latency, and easy server creation.
Discord launched publicly in May 2015 and grew through organic word-of-mouth in gaming communities. The platform's big break came when it gained traction on Reddit gaming forums and through streamers on Twitch. By December 2015, Discord had one million users. The exponential growth continued as gaming communities abandoned older platforms for Discord's superior user experience. The founding vision of creating the best communication platform for communities, starting with gamers, has driven Discord's development ever since.
Discord's funding history demonstrates strong investor confidence in its business model and growth potential. The company has completed nine major funding rounds since 2015, each bringing new strategic partners and capital for expansion.
Seed Round (2015): Discord raised its initial capital of $8.5 million led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Benchmark and Tencent. This early funding allowed the team to build and launch the platform.
Series A (July 2016): Greylock Partners led a $20 million Series A, joined by Benchmark and Spark Capital. At this stage, Discord had reached 11 million users.
Series B (January 2017): Greylock returned to lead a $50 million Series B at a $275 million valuation. This round coincided with Discord reaching 25 million users.
Series C (April 2018): The company raised $50 million at an estimated $700 million valuation, with new investor Index Ventures joining existing backers.
Series D (December 2018): Discord secured $150 million led by Greenoaks Capital, valuing the company at $2 billion. This marked Discord's entry into the unicorn club.
Series E (June 2020): In the midst of pandemic-driven growth, Discord raised $100 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures and including new investor IVP.
Series F (December 2020): Just six months later, Discord raised another $100 million at a $7 billion valuation from Greenoaks Capital.
Series G (February 2021): The company secured $100 million more, doubling its valuation to approximately $10 billion.
Series H (September 2021): Discord's largest round brought in $500 million at a $15 billion valuation, led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Baillie Gifford, and others.
| Funding Round | Date | Amount Raised | Valuation | Lead Investor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2015 | $8.5M | Undisclosed | Greylock Partners |
| Series A | July 2016 | $20M | Undisclosed | Greylock Partners |
| Series B | Jan 2017 | $50M | $275M | Greylock Partners |
| Series C | April 2018 | $50M | $700M | Index Ventures |
| Series D | Dec 2018 | $150M | $2B | Greenoaks Capital |
| Series E | June 2020 | $100M | $3.5B | Index Ventures |
| Series F | Dec 2020 | $100M | $7B | Greenoaks Capital |
| Series G | Feb 2021 | $100M | $10B | Various |
| Series H | Sept 2021 | $500M | $15B | Dragoneer |
The total capital raised exceeds $1 billion, with the majority coming in 2020-2021 during Discord's explosive growth beyond gaming communities.
In March 2021, news broke that Microsoft was in advanced discussions to acquire Discord for over $12 billion. The potential acquisition would have been one of Microsoft's largest deals, following its $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn and its $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media.
The strategic logic was compelling for both sides. Microsoft had been aggressively building its gaming ecosystem through Xbox Game Pass, cloud gaming, and strategic studio acquisitions. Discord would have provided Microsoft with direct access to gaming communities, complementing Xbox Live and enhancing its competitive position against Sony's PlayStation Network. Microsoft already used Discord-like communication features in Microsoft Teams, and acquiring Discord would have accelerated its gaming social initiatives.
For Discord, the acquisition offered financial certainty and resources to scale. Microsoft's cloud infrastructure through Azure could support Discord's growing user base, and its enterprise relationships could accelerate Discord's expansion beyond gaming. The reported $12 billion price tag represented a premium over Discord's $10 billion valuation from its February 2021 funding round.
However, by April 2021, Discord decided to end acquisition talks and remain independent. According to sources close to the negotiations, Jason Citron and the leadership team believed Discord could achieve greater value and impact as a standalone company. The decision reflected confidence in Discord's business model, particularly its growing revenue from Nitro subscriptions, and its expanding user base beyond gaming.
The failed Microsoft deal demonstrated Discord's strong negotiating position and the founders' commitment to their long-term vision. Shortly after rejecting Microsoft's offer, Discord raised its Series H round at a $15 billion valuation, validating the decision to remain independent. The choice to stay private also preserved Discord's unique culture and product direction, avoiding potential integration challenges with a large corporate parent.
Jason Citron has been the driving force behind Discord since its inception, bringing entrepreneurial experience and a deep understanding of gaming communities to his role as CEO. Born in 1984, Citron grew up in Florida and showed early interest in programming and video games. He taught himself to code and built his first game at age 13.
After attending Full Sail University, Citron moved to San Francisco and founded Aurora Feint in 2008, a mobile gaming company. Aurora Feint created OpenFeint, a social platform for mobile games that became incredibly successful, powering features for over 7,000 games and reaching 100 million users. When Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE for $104 million in 2011, he gained valuable insights into building platforms for gaming communities.
This experience directly informed Discord's development. Citron understood that gamers needed better communication tools and that building a platform required focusing on user experience and community needs. His leadership style emphasizes product quality and user feedback, with Discord famously iterating based on community input.
As CEO, Citron has guided Discord through significant strategic decisions, including the pivot from Hammer & Chisel's original gaming focus, the rejection of Microsoft's acquisition offer, and the expansion beyond gaming into broader community use cases. He maintains an active presence in Discord communities and regularly engages with users about product direction.
Citron's net worth is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, though exact figures are not public. His ownership stake in Discord, combined with proceeds from previous exits, places him among successful gaming industry entrepreneurs. Despite this wealth, he remains focused on Discord's mission of creating spaces for communities to connect, often emphasizing that Discord's success comes from solving real problems for real people.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy serves as Discord's Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, responsible for the platform's technical architecture and engineering excellence. While less publicly visible than Citron, Vishnevskiy's contributions have been fundamental to Discord's success.
Vishnevskiy's background includes work at Guildwork, a community platform for Final Fantasy XIV players, where he developed expertise in building communication infrastructure for gaming communities. This experience made him the perfect technical co-founder for Discord. When Citron approached him about building a new communication platform, Vishnevskiy immediately understood the technical challenges involved, particularly around voice quality, latency, and scalability.
As CTO, Vishnevskiy has overseen Discord's engineering team through extraordinary growth challenges. The platform scaled from thousands of users to over 200 million monthly active users while maintaining reliability and performance. This required building custom voice technology, optimizing infrastructure for real-time communication, and creating systems that could handle millions of concurrent connections.
Vishnevskiy has been particularly focused on Discord's technical differentiation. The platform's voice technology uses Opus audio codec and custom implementations that minimize latency and maximize quality, even on poor network connections. Discord's architecture uses Elixir and Rust for backend services, chosen specifically for their ability to handle massive concurrency and maintain low latency.
Under Vishnevskiy's technical leadership, Discord has also pioneered features like Go Live streaming, screen sharing, and video chat, all requiring sophisticated engineering to work smoothly for millions of users. His team has published technical blog posts about Discord's infrastructure challenges, contributing to the broader engineering community.
Like Citron, Vishnevskiy holds a substantial equity stake in Discord, though exact percentages remain private. His continued involvement as CTO ensures that technical excellence remains central to Discord's product strategy, maintaining the platform's reputation for reliability and performance.
Discord's valuation has increased dramatically since its founding, reflecting both revenue growth and investor enthusiasm for communications platforms. The company's most recent valuation of $15 billion from its September 2021 Series H round represented a meteoric rise from its $2 billion valuation just three years earlier.
Several factors drive Discord's valuation. User growth has been extraordinary, with the platform reaching 150 million monthly active users by 2021 and surpassing 200 million by 2024. These users are highly engaged, with the average user spending hours per day on the platform. Discord hosts millions of active servers, ranging from small friend groups to communities with millions of members.
Revenue growth has accompanied user expansion. Discord generated approximately $130 million in revenue in 2020, growing to an estimated $300 million in 2021, and analysts project 2024 revenue exceeding $600 million. This represents impressive growth rates above 100% year-over-year during peak periods. The company's revenue comes primarily from Discord Nitro subscriptions, server boosting, and more recently, monetization features for server owners.
Discord's financial metrics compare favorably to other communication platforms at similar stages. At a $15 billion valuation with $300 million in revenue, Discord traded at roughly 50x revenue, aggressive but not unprecedented for high-growth consumer technology companies. For comparison, Slack was acquired by Salesforce at approximately 50x revenue, and Zoom traded at similar multiples during peak growth periods.
The company has not disclosed profitability metrics, but industry estimates suggest Discord operates at a loss while investing heavily in growth, engineering, and infrastructure. This is typical for high-growth SaaS companies prioritizing market share over near-term profits. Discord's business model, with relatively low customer acquisition costs due to viral growth and high gross margins on subscriptions, suggests a path to profitability as the company matures.
Discord's valuation faces some pressure in the current market environment. Many high-growth technology companies have seen valuations compress since 2021, and Discord would likely face a different valuation in today's market. However, continued user and revenue growth, combined with path to profitability, positions Discord well for eventual liquidity events.
Discord's business model has evolved significantly from its early days, when the platform was entirely free with no clear monetization strategy. Today, Discord generates revenue through multiple streams while maintaining its core service free for most users.
Discord Nitro represents the primary revenue source. This premium subscription service launched in 2017, offering enhanced features for $9.99 per month or $99.99 annually. Nitro subscribers receive higher upload limits (up to 500MB versus 25MB for free users), better video quality, custom Discord tags, animated avatars, and access to custom emojis across servers. A lower-tier option, Nitro Basic, costs $2.99 monthly and provides some benefits without the full feature set. Millions of users subscribe to Nitro, generating substantial recurring revenue.
Server Boosting allows users to enhance their favorite servers with perks like improved audio quality, increased upload limits, custom server banners, and more emoji slots. Users can purchase boosts for $4.99 per month per boost, or receive boosts as part of Nitro subscriptions. Popular servers often have hundreds of boosts, creating another significant revenue stream while engaging communities.
Server Subscriptions launched in 2021, enabling server owners to charge members monthly fees for exclusive access to channels, roles, and content. Discord takes a 10% platform fee on these subscriptions, creating a marketplace where creators can monetize their communities. This positions Discord to capture value from the creator economy without alienating users.
App Directory and Monetization represent emerging revenue opportunities. Discord launched its App Directory in 2022, allowing developers to create and monetize apps that integrate with Discord servers. The company takes a revenue share from these transactions, similar to app store models.
Game Sales were initially part of Discord's strategy through the Discord Store, launched in 2018. However, Discord shut down this initiative in 2019, acknowledging that game distribution was not core to its mission and faced intense competition from Steam, Epic, and other platforms.
Discord's business model succeeds because it maintains a generous free tier that serves most users' needs while offering premium features that enhance experiences for power users and communities. This freemium approach, combined with viral growth mechanics, keeps customer acquisition costs low while building a large addressable market for conversion to paid tiers. The model also aligns incentives, as Discord succeeds when communities thrive, rather than through advertising or selling user data.
Discord's future trajectory focuses on several strategic priorities as the company positions itself for potential public markets while maintaining growth and product leadership. While the company has not announced definite IPO plans, several indicators suggest public listing remains a possibility within the next few years.
IPO Considerations: Discord's decision to reject Microsoft's acquisition and raise capital at a $15 billion valuation signals intention to remain independent and likely pursue public markets eventually. The company's revenue scale, user growth, and institutional investor base create a strong foundation for an IPO. However, challenging public market conditions for technology companies since 2022 have likely delayed these plans. Discord will need to demonstrate consistent revenue growth and a clear path to profitability before going public.
Expansion Beyond Gaming: While gaming remains Discord's core user base, the platform has successfully expanded into education, hobbyist communities, business teams, and general social groups. The pandemic accelerated this diversification, with student groups, book clubs, fitness communities, and professional networks adopting Discord. This expansion addresses a larger total addressable market beyond gaming's 3 billion players, positioning Discord as a general-purpose communication platform.
Monetization Enhancement: Discord continues developing new revenue streams beyond Nitro subscriptions. Server subscriptions, app monetization, and features for content creators represent growth opportunities. The company is carefully balancing monetization with user experience, avoiding advertising-based models that might compromise Discord's appeal. Enhanced monetization tools for server owners could transform Discord into a platform economy where creators earn income while Discord captures platform fees.
International Growth: While Discord has strong adoption in North America and Europe, significant opportunities exist in Asia, Latin America, and other regions. Localization, partnerships with regional gaming companies, and features tailored to local preferences could accelerate international expansion. Competition from established platforms like WeChat in China or Line in Japan presents challenges, but Discord's superior gaming-focused features provide differentiation.
Technology and Features: Discord's product roadmap includes enhancing video capabilities, improving mobile experiences, and developing features for larger communities. Activities like games within Discord, better content moderation tools, and integration with emerging platforms like VR/AR represent future development areas. The company continues investing heavily in engineering and infrastructure to support growth.
Competition: Discord faces competition from Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, and gaming-specific platforms. However, Discord's unique positioning at the intersection of gaming, communities, and social communication provides defensible differentiation. The platform's network effects and strong community loyalty create switching costs that protect market position.
Discord's future success depends on executing this multi-faceted strategy while maintaining the product quality and community focus that fueled its growth. Whether through IPO or other liquidity events, Discord's ownership structure will eventually evolve, but the company's mission of creating spaces for communities appears secure.
Is Discord owned by Microsoft?
No, Discord is not owned by Microsoft. While Microsoft attempted to acquire Discord for over $12 billion in 2021, Discord rejected the offer and chose to remain independent. Discord remains a privately held company owned by its founders, employees, and institutional investors.
Who is the CEO and founder of Discord?
Jason Citron is Discord's CEO and co-founder. He founded the company in 2015 along with technical co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who serves as CTO. Citron previously founded OpenFeint, which he sold to GREE for $104 million in 2011.
Is Discord a publicly traded company?
No, Discord is not publicly traded. The company remains private and its shares are not available on public stock exchanges. Discord has raised over $1 billion in venture capital funding but has not announced plans for an initial public offering.
How much is Discord worth in 2024?
Discord's last official valuation was $15 billion from its September 2021 Series H funding round. While the company has not announced a new valuation since then, its worth in 2024 likely remains in the $10-20 billion range depending on revenue growth and market conditions for technology companies.
Does Tencent own Discord?
No, Tencent does not own Discord outright. Tencent Holdings invested in Discord during the company's 2018 Series E funding round and owns a minority stake reported to be less than 5%. Discord remains independently controlled by its founders and distributed ownership among multiple investors.
Discord's ownership structure reflects a successful venture-backed company that has maintained independence despite lucrative acquisition offers. Who owns Discord? The answer involves co-founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who retain significant stakes, alongside major institutional investors including Greylock Partners, Benchmark, Tencent, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Fidelity Investments who participated in Discord's $1 billion-plus funding journey.
The company's decision to reject Microsoft's $12 billion acquisition offer and remain private demonstrates confidence in its long-term potential. With a $15 billion valuation, over 200 million monthly active users, and growing revenue from Nitro subscriptions and other monetization streams, Discord has established itself as the leading communication platform for gaming communities while expanding into broader markets.
Looking ahead, Discord faces strategic decisions about timing a potential IPO, accelerating international expansion, and balancing growth with profitability. The ownership structure will evolve as the company pursues liquidity events, but the fundamental mission of creating spaces for communities to connect remains unchanged under the leadership of its founding team and supportive investor base.
