We are continuing to build off of a successful few years thanks to all of the friends and communities who are using Discord as we create space where anyone can find belonging.
We’ve just completed a new fundraising round and want to take this opportunity to update you on our progress and give a sense of how we plan to use this new financing to continue to make Discord as helpful and awesome as possible. And honestly, we just want to thank you, the community, for your support and helping to shape the new things we're bringing to Discord.
But first, here’s a look at some of our recent milestones that we’re building upon:
- We’ve surpassed over 150 million people coming to Discord every single month
- We doubled our employee base compared to this time last year and we’re hiring a lot more, so make sure to check out our jobs page
- From 2019 to 2020, we tripled our revenue and doubled the number of people using our service
This huge growth is due to the great strides we’ve made by expanding Discord beyond our roots in gaming to become one of the most popular communications platforms in the world. From career fairs and new music drops, fireside chats and wellness seminars, karaoke sessions and book clubs, Discord has become an inclusive place for people to hang out with others, build lasting relationships, and find belonging.
Our new Series I funding, led by Dragoneer Investment Group, will ensure that we’ll have the means to invest in making Discord even better for all our users and communities, no matter where their interests and hobbies may lie.
A few of the ways we’re going to do this are by:
Offering more ways to express yourself with Nitro
- A Nitro subscription is the best way to experience Discord. Subscribers get access to premium features like higher-quality streams and additional customization options that make expressing yourself more personal and fun.
- This year we’ve added more updates to Nitro than ever before. Recently-added features like custom profile banners, access to 300 Nitro-exclusive stickers and use of custom stickers anywhere, and the ability to send messages twice as long and join twice the amount of servers empowers Nitro subscribers to express their identity and communicate in a deeply authentic, personal way.
- Look out for more fun things soon...maybe even later this month.
Expanding our toolbelt with the most requested features
- We’ll keep listening to our community and building features they want most. Recently, we bolstered our Trust & Safety efforts with the acquisition of Sentropy to help keep people safe, delivered our most requested feature Threads, and made it easier for communities to come together for live audio events with the introduction of Stage channels.
Touching down in Europe and growing our awesome team
- We’re going to continue growing our amazing team of Discordians, including opening our first international office in Amsterdam. We have job listings live and are open for applications in Amsterdam, with a focus on Trust & Safety and Customer Experience to expand our capabilities, and ability to better serve users from different cultures, communicating in multiple languages, across every time zone.
- We love hanging out together and collaborating whether in-person or online. Over the last year and a half, we’ve learned that great work doesn't have to be tied to a physical location and have started to expand our footprint to recruit awesome, talented people beyond a commutable distance from our office(s). We’re designing a location-agnostic future-of-work that will involve an office setting for some, but for others, it may not. We are prioritizing flexibility and trust; empowering our managers to work with their teams to determine their place in a hybrid environment.We will strive to bridge the gap between differences in work settings to foster belonging among all team members — across time zones, schedules, and locations.
Making Discord more accessible to everyone
- We believe Discord should be an inclusive world where no one feels like an outsider, and we’re constantly working on updates to make Discord more accessible to everyone. In the past couple of months we've added several new features to be more inclusive, including a Text-to-Speech slider that lets those who utilize Text-to-Speech adjust the speed at which message content is read back to them, and a Saturation slider that allows color-sensitive users to control the saturation of colors within the desktop application. We're actively working on improving the screen reader experience for desktop users and have already shipped some important improvements to it, like making Quick Switcher accessible to screen readers.
We’d also like to thank our investors for their support and commitment to our mission. We're excited to welcome our new investors: Dragoneer Investment Group, Baillie Gifford, Coatue, Fidelity Management & Research, and Franklin Templeton who participated in this round of financing alongside existing investors.
We’re energized about our future and are continuing to work toward our mission of creating space to help people find belonging, have fun with their favorite people and explore their favorite things. Keep an eye on how Discord evolves as the future unfolds.