Discord
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Discord is an American voice, video, and text chat platform operated by Discord Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California. The service was launched on May 13, 2015, by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, originally to give competitive gamers a low-latency alternative to legacy voice tools like TeamSpeak and Skype. Discord has since expanded into a general-purpose community platform that, by mid-2025, served roughly 200 million monthly active users across communities ranging from gaming and education to programming and AI research. The platform played an outsized role in the rise of generative AI in 2022, when Midjourney launched its image generator as a Discord bot rather than a standalone web app.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | May 13, 2015 |
| Founders | Jason Citron, Stanislav Vishnevskiy |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| CEO | Humam Sakhnini (since April 28, 2025) |
| Chief Technology Officer | Stanislav Vishnevskiy |
| Parent company | Discord Inc. (independent) |
| Employees | ~830 (after January 2024 layoffs) |
| Revenue | ~$600 million (2023, reported) |
| Valuation | ~$15 billion (September 2021 round) |
| Total funding raised | ~$995 million across 12 rounds |
| Website | discord.com |
Before Discord, Jason Citron founded the social mobile gaming company OpenFeint in 2009. Japanese mobile gaming firm GREE acquired OpenFeint in April 2011 for about $104 million. Citron used proceeds from that exit to start a new game studio called Hammer & Chisel in 2012, with backing from Benchmark and YouWeb's incubator 9+. Hammer & Chisel's first product was a tactical iPad game called Fates Forever, released in 2014.
Fates Forever did not gain traction, but during development Citron and his team noticed how poorly existing voice over IP tools handled coordination in titles like League of Legends and Final Fantasy XIV. Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who joined Hammer & Chisel in 2013, pitched a focused voice chat product in late 2014. The two pivoted the company to build it.
Discord went public on May 13, 2015, originally hosted at discordapp.com. The team picked the name because it was short, easy to pronounce, available as a trademark, and had a vague gaming connotation. The initial pitch was simple: a voice chat client that ran in the browser, did not require port forwarding, used less CPU than Skype or TeamSpeak, and worked on every desktop platform.
Growth was fast. The product hit 3 million users in January 2016, when Discord raised a $20 million Series B led by Greylock Partners. By December 2016 the user count had grown to 25 million, and by the end of 2017 it was approaching 90 million.
Discord launched its first paid subscription, Discord Nitro, in January 2017 at $4.99 per month. The original Nitro tier added animated avatars, larger file uploads (raised from 8 MB to 50 MB), use of custom emoji across servers, and a profile badge. Server Boosts arrived in 2019, letting members pay to unlock perks like better audio quality and more emoji slots for a server they liked.
In October 2018, Discord rebranded the existing tier as Nitro Classic and launched a new $9.99 Nitro that bundled access to a curated games library through the Discord Store. The store struggled against Steam and the Epic Games Store; Discord shut its first-party storefront in October 2019 and refocused Nitro on the chat client itself.
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed Discord well beyond its gaming roots. Schools used it for study groups, hobby clubs migrated from Skype and Slack, and crypto and finance communities adopted it as the default chatroom format. Monthly active users crossed 100 million in mid-2020. Discord raised $100 million in a Series H led by Greenoaks Capital in December 2020 at a $7 billion valuation, with Sony joining as a strategic investor.
That same year Discord publicly de-emphasized gaming branding. The company changed its tagline from "Chat for Gamers" to "Chat for Communities and Friends" and broadened its messaging to cover any group that wanted a persistent voice and text space.
In March 2021, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft was in advanced talks to buy Discord for more than $10 billion. Other suitors, including Amazon and Epic Games, were also reported to have approached the company. On April 20, 2021, Bloomberg reported that Discord had walked away from the Microsoft deal. The reported final figure was around $12 billion. Discord stated the company preferred to remain independent and pursue an eventual public listing.
Four months later, in September 2021, Discord raised a $500 million Series I led by Dragoneer Investment Group at a $15 billion valuation, more than double its valuation from a year earlier. Other investors in that round included Baillie Gifford, Coatue Management, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton.
On May 3, 2021, Discord and Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a partnership to bring Discord chat to PlayStation. Sony took a minority stake as part of Discord's funding activities. Account linking arrived first, letting PSN users display PlayStation game activity on their Discord profile. Voice chat between PlayStation 5 users and Discord servers shipped in 2023.
In May 2021, on Discord's sixth anniversary, the company rolled out a visual rebrand. The mascot logo (a friendly game controller called Clyde) was redrawn in a more rounded style, the brand color shifted to a brighter "Blurple" (#5865F2), and the slogan changed from "Your place to talk" to "Imagine a place." The redesign drew mixed reactions from the user base, particularly around the new logo and a less readable font.
Discord cut about 40 employees in August 2023 (roughly 4% of staff). On January 11, 2024, the company announced a much larger reduction: 170 employees, about 17% of headcount. In an internal memo, CEO Jason Citron told staff that the company had grown 5x since 2020 and had taken on too many projects, becoming "less efficient." The 2024 cuts were part of a broader wave of post-pandemic layoffs across the tech sector.
On April 23, 2025, Discord announced that Humam Sakhnini would become its new chief executive officer effective April 28. Sakhnini, a former McKinsey partner, had previously served as president of mobile games maker King (the studio behind Candy Crush) and later as vice chairman of Activision Blizzard. Citron stayed on as a board member and adviser to the new CEO; Vishnevskiy continued as CTO.
In March 2025, Bloomberg reported that Discord had hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to lead an initial public offering. On January 6, 2026, Bloomberg and Reuters reported that Discord had filed confidentially for a US IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As of the filing date, the timing of the public listing and the company's most recent valuation had not been disclosed publicly.
Discord is organized around the concept of a server: a persistent, invitation-based community that contains its own channels, member roles, permissions, and integrations. A server can range in size from a handful of friends to communities with millions of members. Within a server, communication is split between text channels, voice channels, and a mix of newer formats added since 2021.
Users can run Discord through a browser, a desktop client (Windows, macOS, Linux), or mobile apps for iOS and Android. The client supports text chat with attachments and rich embeds, voice channels with low-latency multi-party audio, video calls and screen sharing in voice channels and direct messages, and one-to-one or group direct messages outside of any server.
| Feature | Released | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Text channels | 2015 | Persistent chat rooms scoped to a topic |
| Voice channels | 2015 | Always-on voice rooms anyone with permission can drop into |
| Direct messages | 2015 | One-to-one or small group private chats |
| Server Boosts | 2019 | Paid server perks funded by members |
| Stage Channels | March 2021 | Audio-first rooms with speaker and listener roles, similar to Clubhouse |
| Threads | July 27, 2021 | Side conversations branched from a parent message |
| Forum Channels | September 14, 2022 | Posts-and-replies format closer to Reddit or a traditional bulletin board |
| Voice Messages | 2023 | Recorded audio clips in DMs and channels |
| Activities | 2022 | In-channel games and watch-together apps |
Servers that opt into the Community feature get extra moderation tools, an Announcement channel that publishes to follower servers, and the option to be listed in Server Discovery. Discord also runs an App Directory where verified bots and integrations can be installed into a server with a few clicks.
Discord's chat backend is built mostly in Elixir, the BEAM-based language created by Jose Valim. Elixir runs on the Erlang virtual machine and inherits Erlang's design for low-latency concurrent message passing, which suits a chat product almost perfectly. By 2020, Discord's published engineering posts said its Elixir cluster was handling more than 12 million concurrent WebSocket connections and tens of millions of events per second.
The platform uses Rust where Elixir's performance ceiling was a problem. In a March 2020 engineering post, Discord described rewriting its Read States service (which tracks which messages each user has seen) from Go to Rust. The rewrite eliminated the Go runtime's garbage-collection latency spikes that had been causing user-visible delays. The team also used the Rustler library to embed Rust data structures directly into Elixir processes, allowing single Elixir processes to scale past 11 million concurrent users.
The data layer evolved significantly over time. Discord's original database for chat history was MongoDB, then migrated to Apache Cassandra around 2017, and then to ScyllaDB (a Cassandra-compatible C++ rewrite) in 2022 to handle trillions of messages. Discord uses Python for its API gateway and various internal services and runs a heavily modified ELK and Prometheus stack for observability.
Discord started as a competitive gaming tool. The first communities to adopt it at scale were guilds and clans in MMOs and esports teams. League of Legends, Final Fantasy XIV, and World of Warcraft players were heavy early users. By 2017 Twitch streamers routinely embedded "join my Discord" links in their stream overlays.
The pandemic broadened the user base. Programming communities moved from IRC and Slack to Discord servers. Open-source projects set up Discord servers next to or instead of mailing lists. Universities used Discord for class study groups. Crypto and NFT projects adopted it as the default place to talk to a community.
AI and machine learning communities grew especially fast on Discord starting in 2022. Many research labs, model hosts, and AI startups now run public Discord servers as their primary user-facing community channel, including communities oriented around Stable Diffusion, OpenAI's API, and various open-weight model releases on Hugging Face.
Midjourney is the clearest example of Discord's role in AI distribution. The company opened its public beta on July 12, 2022, with the entire user interface implemented as Discord slash commands inside an official Midjourney server. Users typed /imagine followed by a prompt; the bot replied with four image grids and reaction buttons for upscaling or generating variations. The decision to skip a custom web UI was unusual for a generative model but turned Midjourney's server into one of the largest on Discord, with the server cap of 1 million members hit within months of launch. Midjourney later added a web interface in 2023, but the Discord bot remained the main entry point for years.
Many generative AI projects copied Midjourney's distribution pattern. Stable Diffusion communities, model fine-tuners, and AI tooling startups frequently launch with a Discord bot. Discord's combination of low-friction sign-up, public channels for showcase, and per-user direct messages made it a natural fit for image and video generation services where output is part of the social experience.
In March 2023, Discord launched Clyde, an AI chat companion based on OpenAI's models that lived inside DMs and group chats. Clyde could answer questions, recommend GIFs, and join conversations on request. The company shut Clyde down on December 1, 2023, citing a strategic shift. Discord followed up with server-level AI features, including AutoMod AI (which catches policy violations in moderated channels) and Conversation Summaries (which compress long backlogs into bullet summaries). Server-level Clyde-style features returned in late 2024 in a more limited form.
Discord's bot ecosystem is one of the largest of any chat platform. Bots are accounts created through the Discord Developer Portal that can read and post messages, manage members, react to slash commands, and offer rich interactions like buttons and modal forms. Most popular community servers run multiple bots for moderation, leveling, role management, and entertainment.
| Bot | Primary use | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| MEE6 | Moderation, leveling, custom commands | Long-running all-in-one bot; widely used and widely criticized for its premium pricing model |
| Dyno | Moderation, automod, music | One of the oldest mainstream moderation bots, used in millions of servers |
| Carl-bot | Reaction roles, embed messages, moderation | Best known for its reaction-roles system |
| YAGPDB | Moderation and custom commands | Heavily customizable, free-tier focused |
| ProBot | Moderation and welcome messages | Aimed at smaller communities, free moderation features |
| Midjourney Bot | Image generation | Default interface for the Midjourney service from 2022 onward |
| Wick | Anti-raid, anti-nuke | Aggressive permission-protection bot used by larger servers |
| Tatsu | Leveling, currency, mini-games | Long-running community engagement bot |
In August and September 2021, Google sent cease-and-desist letters to the developers of Groovy and Rythm, two music bots that streamed audio from YouTube into Discord voice channels. Both bots were among the most-installed bots on Discord at the time, present in hundreds of millions of servers. Groovy shut down on August 30, 2021, and Rythm followed on September 15, 2021. The shutdowns were one of the most visible enforcement actions against the bot ecosystem and pushed users either toward smaller alternatives like Hydra and Jockie Music or toward Discord's own short-lived Watch Together feature.
Discord's primary revenue sources are user subscriptions and server-level paid features. The company does not run advertising in chat. Monetization streams include:
| Product | Price (US) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Nitro | $9.99/month or $99.99/year | File upload limit raised to 500 MB, custom server profile, animated avatars, HD video, two free Server Boosts |
| Nitro Basic | $2.99/month or $29.99/year | Custom emoji and stickers across servers, larger uploads, no boosts |
| Server Boosts | $4.99 per boost/month | Members pay to unlock server-wide perks like higher audio quality and more emoji slots |
| Server Subscriptions | Server-set | Servers can sell paid roles or content to members; Discord takes a cut |
| Premium App Subscriptions | App-set | Bot and app developers can sell recurring subscriptions inside Discord |
Reported revenue grew from about $130 million in 2020 to roughly $445 million in 2022 and approximately $600 million in 2023, according to private estimates compiled by Sacra and other data services. Discord has not publicly disclosed audited financials.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investors | Reported valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2013 | $1.6M | YouWeb Incubator, Benchmark | (Hammer & Chisel) |
| Series A | 2014 | $8.6M | Benchmark | n/a |
| Series B | January 2016 | $20M | Greylock Partners | n/a |
| Series C | January 2017 | $50M | Spark Capital, Index Ventures | $700M |
| Series D | April 2018 | $50M | Index Ventures, Greenoaks | $1.65B |
| Series E | December 2018 | $150M | Greenoaks Capital | $2.05B |
| Series F | June 2020 | $100M | Index Ventures, Greenoaks | $3.5B |
| Series G | December 2020 | $100M | Greenoaks Capital | $7B |
| Sony strategic | May 2021 | undisclosed | Sony Interactive Entertainment | n/a |
| Series H | September 2021 | $500M | Dragoneer Investment Group | $15B |
The table reflects publicly reported figures; round labels and totals vary across sources. Discord's total disclosed funding sits at approximately $995 million.
The most prominent leak in Discord's history involved Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Starting around October 2022 and continuing into 2023, Teixeira posted photographs of classified US intelligence documents to a small private Discord server called Thug Shaker Central, primarily for an audience of online friends interested in guns and Russian-language internet culture.
The documents covered the Russo-Ukrainian war, North Korea, Iran, and other foreign intelligence assessments. They began circulating from the private server to Telegram, 4chan, and Twitter in early April 2023. The FBI arrested Teixeira at his mother's home in North Dighton, Massachusetts on April 13, 2023. He pleaded guilty in March 2024 and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison in November 2024. The Air Force separately disciplined 15 service members over the leak in December 2023.
The incident put Discord under unusual scrutiny because the leaks happened on a small private server, exactly the kind of low-discoverability community Discord encourages. Discord publicly committed to working with law enforcement and tightened its safety reporting workflows.
A June 2023 NBC News investigation linked Discord to at least 35 cases of adult prosecutions for kidnapping, grooming, and sexual assault of minors since 2017, plus 165 prosecutions for spreading child sexual abuse material. The Stanford Internet Observatory and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation criticized Discord's response times and verification practices.
In early 2024, CEO Jason Citron testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee alongside the heads of Meta, TikTok, X, and Snap in a hearing on online child safety. Discord announced new minor safety measures including teen safety assist, expanded content scanning with PhotoDNA and CLIP-based detection, and tighter friend request restrictions. The 2024 California Terms of Service report Discord filed disclosed the volume of CSAM-related actions the company had taken in the first half of 2024. Senator Mark Warner sent Discord a letter in August 2024 specifically about "764" and other violent extremist groups using the platform to target minors.
The 2021 Groovy and Rythm shutdowns (described in the Bot Ecosystem section above) were largely a YouTube terms-of-service issue rather than a Discord issue, but they damaged trust in third-party bots and showed how quickly a major part of the user experience could vanish.
In September 2025, Discord disclosed that a third-party customer-support vendor (Zendesk) had been breached, exposing data that users had submitted to Discord's age verification process. The breach affected an estimated 70,000 users with verification photos and identification documents in the dataset, a smaller subset of a larger 2.1 million-record dataset attackers had reportedly tried to extort Discord over.