Discord Valuation and Revenue: $9.9B Pre-IPO, $15B Peak

Discord is still a private company as of October 2026.

Its last priced funding round, a $500 million raise led by Dragoneer Investment Group in September 2021, valued it at about $15 billion, Reuters reported. Secondary trading now puts it lower. Forge's price of $36.50 a share on August 19, 2026 implied a valuation of about $9.94 billion.

Discord filed confidentially for a US IPO in January 2026, according to Bloomberg. TechCrunch reported it was aiming for a March debut, which did not happen. As of October 13, 2026, SEC EDGAR shows no public S-1 for Discord, so there is no IPO price, ticker or public market value yet.

Discord does not publish its revenue. Bloomberg reported in March 2025 that revenue quadrupled between 2020 and 2024 to more than $600 million on an annualized basis. In April 2025, Discord said it had posted positive adjusted EBITDA for five straight quarters.

On users, Discord said in February 2026 that it had more than 200 million monthly active users. Its September 2026 advertising announcement put daily active users at more than 90 million as of Q2 2026.

The short version of why it grew: Discord made talking while gaming as easy as clicking a link, kept that part free, and charged only for extras.

Discord's growth in one table

Date	Milestone
April 2012	Jason Citron starts the game studio that becomes Hammer & Chisel
May 2015	Discord launches; a Final Fantasy XIV subreddit post brings 600 people in one day
January 2016	Raises about $20M led by Greylock; more than 3M people have tried it
December 2016	25M registered users
January 2017	Launches Nitro; raises about $50M led by Index Ventures at a reported $725M pre-money valuation
June 2017	45M registered users and 9M daily active users
April 2018	Raises $50M at a $1.65B valuation
December 2018	Raises $150M at a $2.05B valuation led by Greenoaks; 200M registered users
May 2019	250M registered users and 56M monthly active users
September 2019	Drops the Nitro games catalog
June 2020	100M+ monthly active users; raises $100M at a reported $3.5B valuation
December 2020	Raises $100M at a valuation of about $7B
March–April 2021	Microsoft talks at more than $10B; Discord walks away
September 2021	Raises $500M at about $15B; 150M+ monthly active users
January 2024	Lays off 17% of staff
2024	Launches Quests ads and refocuses on gaming
April 2025	Humam Sakhnini becomes CEO; 200M+ monthly active users; five quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA
January 2026	Bloomberg reports a confidential IPO filing
August 2026	Forge price implies a $9.94B valuation
September 2026	Opens self-serve ads; 90M+ daily active users as of Q2 2026

1. Discord came out of a game that didn't work

Discord's founders did not set out to build a chat app.

Jason Citron had already built and sold one gaming company. He founded OpenFeint, a social platform for mobile games that sold to GREE in 2011 for $104 million.

In April 2012, he started a new studio, Phoenix Guild, to build a mobile multiplayer game called Fates Forever, according to Discord's company history. Stanislav Vishnevskiy joined in 2013, and the studio, renamed Hammer & Chisel, launched the game in summer 2014.

Citron later said on 20VC that the plan was to use the game to bootstrap a group chat network. The game "wasn't a hit" and was "not gonna be a venture scale business," he said.

But building it showed the team a different path. Fates Forever had voice chat, text chat and forums built in, and the founders were frustrated by the tools they used to talk while playing PC games.

So in early 2015, they started building the chat app on its own.

2. Discord launched by asking a subreddit for feedback

The first version of Discord did not take off by itself.

Citron told 20VC that within three or four months the team had about 20 daily active users who weren't employees. Then growth stalled, and people told them a group chat app for gaming was "the dumbest idea ever."

What worked was asking for feedback instead of pitching.

The team had a friend post in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit, where players were preparing for a new expansion, asking what people thought of a new voice app. The founders then posted a link to a Discord server where they were hanging out, so curious readers could talk to them directly.

Discord's own account of that day, written by Citron in January 2016, says 600 people tried the app. The team "had a team lunch and celebrated and danced around in circles."

Starting with one game was deliberate. In a May 2015 AMA, Citron said Discord wanted to make the product "as amazing as possible for a particular group of people and expand from there." He also said it had about 1,000 users in total, up from about five a week earlier.

Citron told 20VC that the team repeated this playbook for about six months.

3. Discord made voice chat a link, not a server rental

Before Discord, getting friends into group voice chat meant "the rigmarole of hosting servers and exchanging passwords," as Engadget put it in 2017.

Discord removed that step.

Greylock wrote in 2016 that Discord made it "incredibly simple to get a session going (just share a link with your friend and they are in)." Engadget described its click-and-join servers as needing no software installation or logins.

It was also free. Discord promised that core voice and text "will always be free," with "no server fees," in its Nitro launch post.

Every server invite was a small piece of distribution. One person set up a server, shared the link, and the rest of the group joined.

The numbers moved quickly:

More than 3 million people had tried Discord by January 2016, and 1 million more were joining each month, Discord said.
In January 2016, it raised about $20 million led by Greylock, with Tencent and Benchmark as existing investors, GamesBeat reported.
By July 2016, it had passed 11 million registered users, Game Developer reported.
By December 2016, it had 25 million registered users sending 100 million messages a day, TechCrunch reported.

In August 2017, TechCrunch wrote that Discord had "out-gunned its gaming-specific competitors like TeamSpeak, Mumble and Ventrilo" and was going after Skype with video chat and screen sharing.

4. Discord let communities build on top of it

Discord grew through the people running servers, not just individual users.

By January 2016, before it had an official API, the community had already built dice bots, moderation bots and music bots, Citron wrote. Streamers such as Lirik and summit1g and game developers such as Cloud Imperium Games were already backing it.

Discord then gave those builders official tools. Its company history says the official API launched in spring 2016 and eventually powered hundreds of thousands of apps, followed by custom server emoji that summer.

It also started working with game studios. In July 2016, Citron told Game Developer that Discord was helping developers such as Nexon and Trion Worlds set up official communities and integrate with the API.

This made Discord more useful the more people built on it. A server with good bots, custom emoji and an active moderator team was hard to move somewhere else.

By June 2017, Discord had 45 million registered users and 9 million daily actives, TechCrunch reported.

5. Discord charged for extras, never for talking

Discord had to make money without charging for the thing people came for.

It chose subscriptions over ads. In January 2017, it launched Discord Nitro, a paid tier with animated avatars, custom emoji anywhere and a bigger upload limit, Discord announced. Engadget reported that it cost $5 a month.

The same month, Discord quietly raised about $50 million led by Index Ventures at a $725 million pre-money valuation, TechCrunch reported citing sources.

Nitro grew into a full premium tier. As of late 2025, it cost $9.99 a month, with a $2.99 Nitro Basic option, according to PitchBook. Server Boosting, added in 2019, let members pay for extra perks for a shared community, according to Discord.

Citron later framed the no-ads model as a selling point. "If you don't pay for the product, you are the product," he told CNBC in 2021.

The approach worked because the free product was what spread. Nitro only had to convert a small share of a very large, very engaged audience.

6. Discord tried to become a game store, then walked away

Not every expansion worked.

In December 2018, Discord raised $150 million at a $2.05 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks Capital, TechCrunch reported. It had raised $50 million at a $1.65 billion valuation that April.

A big part of the pitch was a PC game store to rival Steam, with a 90/10 revenue split for developers. GamesBeat reported that Discord had 200 million registered users at the time.

The store did not last. In September 2019, Discord said "the vast majority of Nitro subscribers didn't play" the bundled games and removed the catalog, in a company post.

Citron told 20VC that competing for top games would have required large minimum guarantees, and he decided it wasn't worth it. He said he called the investor who had just funded the round and asked, "Do you want the money back?" The investor told him to keep going.

The retreat mattered. Discord kept its cash and attention on the chat product people were already using every day.

7. The pandemic turned Discord into "your place to talk"

Discord was already big before COVID. In May 2019, it had 250 million registered users and 56 million monthly active users, Variety reported.

Then lockdowns pushed school clubs, study groups, friend groups and fan communities online.

On June 30, 2020, Citron and Vishnevskiy wrote that Discord had passed 100 million monthly active users who spent 4 billion minutes a day in conversation. They launched a new tagline, "Your place to talk," and made the app's jokes and references less gaming-specific.

Investors followed the usage:

In June 2020, Discord raised $100 million at a reported $3.5 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported.
In December 2020, it raised another $100 million at a valuation above $7 billion, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Greenoaks, CNBC reported.

Discord later said that from 2019 to 2020 it tripled its revenue and doubled the number of people using the service.

8. Discord turned down Microsoft

In March 2021, Microsoft was in talks to buy Discord for more than $10 billion, Reuters reported citing sources. Discord had been valued at about $7 billion three months earlier.

The talks ended in April. Discord halted sale discussions with suitors including Microsoft and renewed its interest in a future IPO, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Bloomberg reported that Discord rejected a $12 billion bid. It also reported that Twitter had expressed interest and that some talks valued Discord as high as $15 billion to $18 billion.

Citron explained the decision years later on 20VC. Microsoft had been "a really fantastic partner," he said, but "it was about controlling our own destiny."

Five months later, Discord raised $500 million in a Series I led by Dragoneer, with Baillie Gifford, Coatue, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton joining, Reuters reported. The round valued Discord at about $15 billion; PitchBook puts the post-money figure at $14.7 billion.

At the time, Discord said more than 150 million people were using it every month.

9. Discord cut back and refocused on gaming

The pandemic expansion came with costs.

In January 2024, Discord laid off 17% of its staff, about 170 people. "We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020," Citron wrote in a memo published by The Verge.

TechCrunch noted, citing The Verge, that Discord still wasn't profitable at the time.

In May 2024, Citron said Discord would narrow its focus "from broadly being a community-centric chat app to being a place that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests," in a company post. Earlier that spring, he had said 95% of Discord's users play games, The Verge reported.

Citron later told 20VC that the company had gone "down some dead ends" with features that weren't resonating, and that it grew from 200 to 1,000 employees in that period.

The financial picture changed quickly after the reset. By April 2025, Discord said it had positive adjusted EBITDA for the past five quarters.

10. Discord started selling ads players choose to watch

For most of its history, Discord avoided ads. That changed in 2024 with Quests.

Quests let game publishers sponsor rewards for players who stream or play their game, Discord explained. It later added Video Quests for trailers and launches. Discord had eschewed advertising until then over concerns it would be too intrusive, Business Insider reported.

In April 2025, Discord named Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard vice chairman and former president of King, as CEO, the company announced. Citron moved to the board and became an advisor. TechCrunch reported the move came amid rumors that Discord was eyeing an IPO.

The ad business then expanded in steps:

In summer 2025, Discord introduced Orbs, a reward users earn from Quests and can spend on profile items or Nitro, according to its company history.
In a seven-week beta, Orbs drove a 16x increase in first-time shop purchases, PitchBook reported, citing Discord.
In March 2026, Discord said Quests had a 96% median completion rate and launched Instant Play Quests, which let players try a cloud-streamed game without installing it, in a press release.
In September 2026, it launched Discord Ads Manager, its first self-serve campaign tool, and a new mobile Video Quests format, Discord announced.

Discord is also selling itself to game studios as a growth channel. In its March 2026 release, it said more than 10,000 game communities on Discord had more than 80 million members as of December 31, 2025. It also said players using Discord voice channels played games an estimated 66% more days in the three months to December 2025.

How fast did Discord grow?

Discord's growth is easiest to follow through users, because the company has never published its revenue.

Users

About 1,000 users in May 2015, Citron said.
25 million registered users by December 2016, TechCrunch reported.
56 million monthly active users by May 2019, Variety reported.
More than 100 million monthly active users by June 2020, Discord said.
More than 150 million monthly active users by September 2021, Discord said.
More than 200 million monthly active users as of February 2026, Discord said.
More than 90 million daily active users as of Q2 2026, Discord said.

Early figures are registered accounts, and later ones are monthly or daily actives, so they are not directly comparable.

Revenue

Every revenue figure for Discord is either reported by sources or estimated by analysts. Nothing is audited and public, because Discord's IPO paperwork is confidential.

Discord said it tripled revenue from 2019 to 2020.
The Information reported that Discord's revenue growth slowed to 44% in 2022.
Bloomberg reported that revenue quadrupled from 2020 to 2024, reaching more than $600 million on an annualized basis.
Sacra estimates Discord reached $725 million in annual recurring revenue at the end of 2024, up about 21% from $600 million in 2023.
PitchBook estimates revenue of $445 million in 2022, $600 million in 2023 and $890 million in 2024.

PitchBook's 2024 estimate is well above Bloomberg's reported figure and Sacra's estimate. Until Discord publishes an S-1, "more than $600 million" in annualized revenue by 2024 is the most widely cited reported number.

Valuation

$2.05 billion in December 2018, TechCrunch reported.
About $7 billion in December 2020, CNBC reported.
About $15 billion in September 2021, its last priced round, Reuters reported.
About $6.8 billion implied by secondary trading in September 2025, PitchBook reported, citing Caplight.
About $8.53 billion as of July 8, 2026, according to Forge.
About $9.94 billion as of August 19, 2026, according to Forge.

Secondary-market prices are indications, not official valuations. Discord has raised about $1.1 billion in total, Bloomberg reported citing PitchBook data.

Discord's growth loop

Discord's growth comes down to one loop:

A player wants to talk with friends while gaming.
They create a server for free and share an invite link.
Friends join, and the server becomes the group's default hangout.
Some of those friends start or join other servers, including big game and creator communities.
Communities add bots, emoji and moderators, which makes them harder to leave.
A small share of highly engaged users pay for Nitro or boost a server they care about.
Game studios come to Discord because their most engaged players are already there, and now pay for Quests and other ads.
Studio communities and Quests bring more players into Discord.

The key is that the free product does the spreading. Nitro and ads monetize the attention without getting in the way of the invite link.

What Discord did differently

It found its first users where they already talked

Discord didn't buy ads to launch. It went to a subreddit full of players preparing for the same game expansion and invited them to talk to the founders.

It started with one game

Discord focused on Final Fantasy XIV players first, then spread to other games and communities from there.

It removed setup, not just cost

Group voice chat already existed. Discord's advantage was that nobody in the group had to host a server or pass around passwords.

It kept the core free and sold identity and perks

Nitro sold things like animated avatars, custom emoji and bigger uploads. People paid to express themselves or support their communities, not to be allowed to talk.

It said no to distractions

Discord dropped its game catalog after a year and turned down Microsoft. Both decisions kept it focused on the chat product.

It used its users as its pitch to advertisers

Instead of standard display ads, Discord built Quests around something its users already did: playing and streaming games with friends.

What could slow Discord down?

The IPO is not guaranteed. Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that deliberations were ongoing and Discord could still decide not to list, according to Reuters. The reported March target passed without a public S-1.

The valuation has to catch up. Secondary prices in 2026 have stayed below the 2021 round. PitchBook argued that management needs to scale advertising into a nine-figure business to justify current valuation expectations.

Trust and safety keeps getting harder. In February 2026, Discord delayed a global age verification rollout after user backlash, TechCrunch reported. That backlash followed an October 2025 disclosure that about 70,000 users may have had government ID photos exposed in a breach at a third-party vendor.

Discord launched a revised system on September 22, 2026 that estimates age groups from account signals. The company says more than 90% of users won't be asked to confirm their age, according to its announcement. Laws requiring age checks are expanding, so this will keep shaping the product.

Ads could change how the product feels. TechCrunch noted when Sakhnini was appointed that fans may worry about Discord moving in a more corporate, profit-hungry direction. Discord's growth depended on users trusting it as their own space.

Borrowing Discord's subreddit launch

Discord got its first wave of users by joining a subreddit conversation that was already happening and asking for honest feedback. Okara's Reddit Agent finds high-intent Reddit threads in your niche and drafts replies you post yourself, so you can show up in those conversations without spending hours searching for them.

Frequently asked questions

What is Discord's valuation in 2026?

Discord's last priced funding round valued it at about $15 billion in September 2021. PitchBook puts the post-money figure at $14.7 billion. As of August 19, 2026, Forge's secondary-market price of $36.50 a share implied a valuation of about $9.94 billion. That is an estimate from private trading, not an official valuation.

Is Discord public? Did Discord IPO?

No. Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Discord had filed confidentially for a US IPO with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, and TechCrunch reported it was targeting March. As of October 13, 2026, there is no public S-1 on SEC EDGAR, no ticker and no listing date, so Discord has no public market value.

How much revenue does Discord make?

Discord does not disclose revenue. Bloomberg reported in March 2025 that its revenue quadrupled from 2020 to 2024, reaching more than $600 million on an annualized basis. Analyst estimates for 2024 range from $725 million in annual recurring revenue (Sacra) to $890 million in revenue (PitchBook). Discord said in April 2025 that it had five straight quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA.

How many users does Discord have?

Discord said in February 2026 that it had more than 200 million monthly active users. In September 2026, it said it had more than 90 million daily active users as of Q2 2026. The company also says more than 90% of its users play video games.

How much funding has Discord raised?

Discord has raised about $1.1 billion, according to PitchBook data cited by Bloomberg. Its largest round was a $500 million Series I led by Dragoneer in September 2021. Other investors include Greylock, Benchmark, Index Ventures, Greenoaks, Bessemer, Tencent, Coatue, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton.

Who founded Discord, and who runs it now?

Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy founded Discord and launched it in May 2015. Citron was CEO until April 2025, when Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard vice chairman, took over. Citron remains on the board and advises the CEO, and Vishnevskiy is CTO.

Did Microsoft try to buy Discord?

Yes. In March 2021, Reuters reported that Microsoft was in talks to buy Discord for more than $10 billion. The talks ended in April 2021, and Bloomberg reported that Discord had rejected a $12 billion bid so it could stay independent and consider an IPO.

How does Discord make money?

Discord's core chat is free. It makes money mainly from Nitro subscriptions ($9.99 a month, or $2.99 for Nitro Basic) and Server Boosts. Since 2024, it has added advertising through Quests, and in September 2026 it opened a self-serve ads tool to more advertisers.