Discord Inc. is a Delaware corporation based in San Francisco, according to its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Venture capital firms have put money into the company behind Discord since a seed round in 2011. This table lists Discord's larger funding rounds as Discord, its SEC filings or the press reported them, with the investor that led each round when it was reported. Bloomberg reported a US$15 billion valuation after the September 2021 round, which Discord didn't confirm. Discord's six Form D notices to the SEC, filed from January 2019 to March 2023, report about US$914 million in shares sold to investors, by our count. Who has invested in Discord? {#discord-investors} This list has the investors that Discord, one of its investors or the press reported in each round of funding, and which investor led the round when that was reported. In 2011, the company behind Discord raised a US$1.1 million seed round from the incubator YouWeb, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners. In 2013, Benchmark Capital led the Series A of Hammer & Chisel, the company that later made Discord, and Time Warner and International Data Group also invested. In early 2015, Tencent, a technology company with its head office in Shenzhen, China, invested with Benchmark and Studio 9+, and the amount wasn't disclosed. In January 2025, the US Department of Defense added Tencent to its list of Chinese military companies under Section 1260H of US defense law, and Tencent said the listing was a mistake and that it is neither a military company nor a military supplier. In 2016, Greylock Partners led a round of about US$20 million, and Tencent, the incubator YouWeb and the venture capital firm Benchmark also invested. In January 2017, Index Ventures led the round, according to TechCrunch's sources, and IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock Partners and Benchmark also invested. In April 2018, Discord confirmed a US$50 million investment at a US$1.65 billion valuation and said it couldn't share any more details about the round. In December 2018, Greenoaks Capital led the round, and Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners also invested. In June 2020, Index Ventures led the round. In December 2020, Greenoaks Capital led the Series H round, and Index Ventures also invested. Sony Interactive Entertainment, the company behind PlayStation, made a minority investment in the same round in May 2021. In September 2021, Dragoneer Investment Group led the round, and Baillie Gifford, Coatue, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton also invested. In January 2023, Discord sold about US$15.7 million in shares to three investors, according to its Form D notice to the SEC, which doesn't list who they are.

Is Fluxer funded by venture capital?

Fluxer has no venture capital and no outside investors. Hampus Kraft, who founded Fluxer, owns all of Fluxer Platform AB, the Swedish company that runs fluxer.com, and the people who use Fluxer fund it through optional purchases and donations.

Discord and some other chat apps are funded by venture capital firms, and each fact about them on this page links to its source in the list at the bottom of the page.

Who funds Discord?

Discord Inc. is a Delaware corporation based in San Francisco, according to its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).¹ Venture capital firms have put money into the company behind Discord since a seed round in 2011.²

This table lists Discord's larger funding rounds as Discord, its SEC filings or the press reported them, with the investor that led each round when it was reported.

When	Amount	Led by
2013	US$8.2 million	Benchmark Capital²
2016	About US$20 million	Greylock Partners²
January 2017	About US$50 million	Index Ventures, according to TechCrunch's sources³
December 2018	US$150 million	Greenoaks Capital⁴
June 2020	US$100 million⁵	Index Ventures, according to TechCrunch⁶
December 2020	US$100 million	Greenoaks Capital⁶
September 2021	US$500 million	Dragoneer Investment Group⁷

Bloomberg reported a US$15 billion valuation after the September 2021 round, which Discord didn't confirm.⁷ Discord's six Form D notices to the SEC, filed from January 2019 to March 2023, report about US$914 million in shares sold to investors, by our count.¹

Who has invested in Discord?

This list has the investors that Discord, one of its investors or the press reported in each round of funding, and which investor led the round when that was reported.

In 2011, the company behind Discord raised a US$1.1 million seed round from the incubator YouWeb, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners.²
In 2013, Benchmark Capital led the Series A of Hammer & Chisel, the company that later made Discord, and Time Warner and International Data Group also invested.²
In early 2015, Tencent, a technology company with its head office in Shenzhen, China,⁸ invested with Benchmark and Studio 9+, and the amount wasn't disclosed.²⁹ In January 2025, the US Department of Defense added Tencent to its list of Chinese military companies under Section 1260H of US defense law, and Tencent said the listing was a mistake and that it is neither a military company nor a military supplier.¹⁰¹¹
In 2016, Greylock Partners led a round of about US$20 million, and Tencent, the incubator YouWeb and the venture capital firm Benchmark also invested.²
In January 2017, Index Ventures led the round, according to TechCrunch's sources, and IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock Partners and Benchmark also invested.³
In April 2018, Discord confirmed a US$50 million investment at a US$1.65 billion valuation and said it couldn't share any more details about the round.¹²
In December 2018, Greenoaks Capital led the round, and Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners also invested.⁴
In June 2020, Index Ventures led the round.⁶
In December 2020, Greenoaks Capital led the Series H round, and Index Ventures also invested.⁶ Sony Interactive Entertainment, the company behind PlayStation, made a minority investment in the same round in May 2021.¹³
In September 2021, Dragoneer Investment Group led the round, and Baillie Gifford, Coatue, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton also invested.⁷
In January 2023, Discord sold about US$15.7 million in shares to three investors, according to its Form D notice to the SEC, which doesn't list who they are.¹

Is Discord going public?

Discord hasn't gone public as of October 31, 2026, and the SEC's filing system shows no public registration statement for a stock market listing.¹ Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Discord had filed confidentially for an initial public offering (IPO) and was working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on a listing. Bloomberg also reported that Discord could still decide not to go ahead with the listing.¹⁴

Jason Citron, who co-founded Discord, stepped down as its CEO in April 2025, and Discord appointed Humam Sakhnini as the new CEO. In the announcement, Citron wrote that the new CEO would lead Discord "through our next chapter of growth and someday becoming a public company."¹⁵ In April 2021, TechCrunch reported that Discord had ended talks about a sale to Microsoft that valued it at around US$10 billion.¹⁶

Sakhnini was Chief Strategy Officer at Activision Blizzard and later took over from the founders of King.¹⁵ TechCrunch reported that he had also been Activision Blizzard's Vice Chairman and the CEO of King, which makes Candy Crush and other mobile games that depend on ads and microtransactions.¹⁷ Dexerto reported that many Discord users were worried the new CEO would bring more microtransactions to Discord.¹⁸

How does Discord use ads and personal data?

Discord sells a paid subscription called Nitro, like Fluxer's Plutonium, and it also shows ads.¹⁹²⁰ It launched Quests in 2024, and its own press release calls them "the platform's opt-in reward-based advertising experience."²⁰²¹ In March 2025, Discord announced its first mobile ad format.²⁰ In September 2026, it opened Ads Manager, where ads compete in an auction, to some advertisers, with fully self-serve access planned for early 2027.²²

In September 2026, the week its age estimates started, Discord began showing US users ads from FanDuel. Discord told GameSpot that it's a limited US test of adult ads for FanDuel's brand and daily fantasy sports. Discord's ad policies still prohibit ads for sportsbooks and casinos, but allow daily fantasy sports ads in some places.²³

Discord's 2025 policy update says it doesn't sell your personal information to third parties. It also says that when you engage with a Quest, it may share some data with its measurement partners, such as whether you started playing a game after seeing the Quest. Discord says it doesn't allow AI companies to train their models on your messages.²⁴

Discord has reported data incidents at companies it used for customer support.

In May 2023, Discord told users that a third-party support agent's account had been compromised, and that their email address, the contents of their messages with Discord support and any attachments may have been exposed.²⁵
In October 2025, Discord said an unauthorized party had targeted 5CA, a customer support provider, and that about 70,000 users may have had government ID photos exposed, from reviews of age-related appeals.²⁶²⁷ Names, contact details, IP addresses, support messages and limited billing information were also involved. Discord said it "was not a breach of Discord, but rather a breach of a third party service provider, 5CA."²⁶

fluxer.com shows no ads, has no advertising partnerships, doesn't sell, rent or license your messages or any other personal data and doesn't share it with anyone for their own advertising or marketing, as sections 3 and 4 of our privacy policy say.

How does Discord use AI and automated features?

In March 2023, Discord added an AI version of its Clyde chatbot, and AutoMod AI and AI conversation summaries as limited experiments, and its launch post said "Our AI features use OpenAI technology, but OpenAI cannot use Discord user data to train its general models."²⁸ Discord stopped the AI Clyde chatbot on December 1, 2023.²⁹

Starting November 16, 2026, every Discoverable Server gets a public web page with automated "Channel Summaries" of its public channels, and Discord says the summaries appear unless the server's admins pick other channels or turn them off.³⁰

Since September 22, 2026, Discord estimates whether an account belongs to a teen or an adult with a model that uses the communities, games and people the account is connected to, account details, activity counts and device signals. Discord says the model doesn't read messages or calls, and that if it gets your age group wrong, you can confirm your age another way, such as with a selfie, a card check or an ID scan.³¹

Discord's terms give it a license to "use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, display, and perform your content" for "providing, developing, and improving our services."³² Its privacy policy says it uses "machine learning systems that help us power and improve our services."³³ Neither document mentions AI or model training, and Discord says it doesn't allow outside AI companies to train their models on your messages.³²³³²⁴

Section 3.1 of our terms says we never train, fine-tune or evaluate AI or machine learning models on your content or use it for advertising or behavioral profiling.

Are other Discord alternatives funded by venture capital?

Some are, and some are paid for by donations or by their makers.

Root, made by Root Communications, Inc. in Los Angeles,³⁴ raised a US$9 million seed round in June 2025, led by Headline Ventures and Konvoy Ventures.³⁵
Element, the company behind the Element app for Matrix, had raised US$18.1 million by May 2020 and raised a US$30 million Series B in July 2021.³⁶³⁷
Stoat says it's "entirely funded through donations."³⁸
GameVox says it has "No venture capital. No investors."³⁹
Mumble is open source software built by a team of volunteer developers, and its sponsors give the project services such as a CDN and build machines.⁴⁰

Who are Fluxer's shareholders?

Hampus Kraft owns all of the shares in Fluxer Platform AB, the Swedish private limited company that runs fluxer.com. He founded it in Stockholm in 2025 and is its CEO. With no other shareholders, Fluxer has no investor waiting for a sale or a stock market listing. If fluxer.com ever changes hands or direction, every published version of the code stays under the AGPL and anyone can keep using it to run their own instance.

Under chapter 5, section 10 of the Swedish Companies Act, anyone can ask to see our share register at the company.⁴¹ Our registration details are on our company information page and with Bolagsverket, the Swedish Companies Registration Office.

How is Fluxer funded?

Fluxer is bootstrapped, and Hampus started the company with his own money. On the Operator Pass page, he says he won't take venture capital and gives this reason. "Investors expect a return, and for chat apps that usually means showing ads or selling data."

Since the company started, the people who use and support Fluxer have funded it through Plutonium and donations, and both are optional. Early supporters started buying Visionary, our lifetime Plutonium offer, in the private beta in late 2025, and those sales kept Fluxer going after it opened to everyone in January 2026, as Hampus wrote in how I built Fluxer. The funding pays for running fluxer.com and building the open source software.

What happened at other apps around a sale or a stock market listing?

The National Venture Capital Association, the industry group for US venture capital firms, says venture capital firms raise their funds from investors such as pension funds, endowments and foundations, and that a standard fund agreement lasts ten years. In its words, "The payoff comes after the company is acquired or goes public."⁴²

Here's what some other apps did around a sale or a stock market listing.

In 2012, WhatsApp wrote "Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product."⁴³ Facebook, now Meta, agreed to buy WhatsApp in 2014 for about US$16 billion in cash and shares.⁴⁴ In June 2025, Meta started showing ads in WhatsApp's Updates tab, and it says it doesn't use your chats, calls or status to target them.⁴⁵
Guilded, a chat app for gaming communities, raised a US$7 million Series A led by Matrix Partners in 2020.⁴⁶ Roblox bought it in August 2021 and said it would "continue to operate as an independent product group."⁴⁷ In September 2025, Roblox wrote that "The Guilded product will sunset at the end of 2025."⁴⁸
In the prospectus for its March 2024 listing on the New York Stock Exchange, Reddit said that in January 2024 it had signed data licensing deals worth US$203.0 million, which let other companies "access, search, and analyze data on our platform."⁴⁹

What keeps Fluxer independent?

Fluxer is free and open source under the AGPL, and anyone can run their own instance for free with no license key, paid tier or reduced edition. Optional federation, which would let people on different instances talk to each other and move their account between them, is planned as an experimental draft in 2026 and a stable release in 2027.

You can export a copy of all your data at any time, and you can delete your own messages in bulk with "Delete my messages" under "Privacy" in "User settings".

End-to-end encryption with no setting to turn it off is planned for voice and video calls in 2026, and for personal notes, DMs and group DMs as an experimental draft in 2026 and a stable release in 2027. Nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted today.

fluxer.com shows no ads and doesn't sell, rent or license your messages or any other personal data or share it with anyone for their advertising, as our privacy policy says, and our terms say we never use your content to train AI models.

fluxer.com stores most data with a US hosting provider today, as section 6 of our privacy policy says. We're moving it to our own hardware in Sweden, with no date set yet, and we plan to move Fluxer's code from GitHub to a Forgejo site we run ourselves.

Sources

Discord Inc. filing list, CIK 0001763840, US Securities and Exchange Commission, accessed 2026-10-31. Six Form D notices filed from 2019-01-08 to 2023-03-15 list Delaware as the state of incorporation and a San Francisco address, and no registration statement for an IPO. The US$914 million is our sum of the amounts sold in the six notices (US$94.0 million, US$100.0 million, US$100.0 million, US$104.1 million, US$500.0 million and US$15.7 million). ² ³ ⁴
Tencent fuels Discord for $20m round, Global Venturing, 2016-02-02, accessed 2026-10-31. ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷
Gamer chat tool Discord secretly raised ~$50M as insiders cashed out, TechCrunch, 2017-06-07, accessed 2026-10-31. ²
Gaming chat startup Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation, TechCrunch, 2018-12-21, accessed 2026-10-31. ²
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Discord confirms $100M raise at a $7B valuation, TechCrunch, 2020-12-17, accessed 2026-10-31. It says Index Ventures led the June 2020 round, Greenoaks Capital led the Series H and Index Ventures took part in it. ² ³ ⁴
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