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Gaming chat startup Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

Chatty gamers are apparently worth billions.

Discord, the gaming chat startup with more than 200 million active users, announced Friday that it had secured $150 million in funding at a $2.05 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners.

The company announced this past April that they had raised $50 million in funding at a $1.65 billion valuation. With this latest bout of cash, Discord has now pulled in more than $280 million in funding.

The influx of new money comes as the chat startup goes full speed ahead on one of its most ambitious offshoots to date, taking on games giant Valve with a gaming store meant to rival the ubiquitous Steam store. The company launched a global beta of the Discord Store in October; they recently announced that starting in 2019, they will be establishing a revenue split of 90/10 for developers that are self-publishing titles on the store, a margin much friendlier to indie devs than the 70/30 split on Steam.

The company’s bread-and-butter remains its chat service, which brings voice and text communications to gamers looking to talk with teammates and fellow enthusiasts during and outside of gameplay. Discord isn’t the only service that offers this capability, but it is definitely one of the most popular with hundreds of millions of users coming to the app every month.

We chatted with CEO Jason Citron at our most recent Disrupt SF event, where he talked about the opportunities available in the online games sales market and what challenges the company had up ahead.



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