Investors and gamers are awaiting any announcement from Discord amid speculation that the video game chat company could also be looking for an initial public offering (IPO).
Discord CEO Jason Citron acknowledged that going public may very well be a future possibility but maintained that the team is targeted on constructing the product and company.
“You understand, on the journey of any company that has raised enterprise capital and has shareholders, obviously, these sorts of things are talked about — and potentially in the long run [it will happen],” Citron said concerning the company’s IPO plans in a Yahoo Finance video interview (see video above). “But we’re very focused on just making an incredible product and showing up every single day to assist people talk and hang around with their friends.”
In early March, the Latest York Times reported that the social chat startup met with bankers to explore an IPO. Meanwhile, several other tech corporations, including AI play CoreWeave and the buy now, pay later app Klarna, are planning to check the general public markets.
Citron discussed his evolution from a game designer to his current role leading the virtual chat application, which reaches tons of of tens of millions of individuals.
“It has been a wild journey to go from that … humble beginnings of constructing games to becoming this place where people talk and spend time with their friends around games,” Citron told Yahoo Finance. “However it’s really rewarding because now we’re able where we’ve got over 200 million people who use our service every month, and we get to innovate on behalf of players.”
In accordance with data provided by the corporate, Discord’s monthly energetic users and day by day energetic users have grown roughly 20% since mid-2021, the identical 12 months Discord was engaged in talks with Microsoft (MSFT) to be acquired for $10 billion.
Though the deal was called off, the interest from one in all the world’s largest software corporations highlighted the strength of the product, which was in-built six years amid supercharged video game industry growth.
“You understand, our core business is definitely a consumer subscription service that we provide inside Discord,” Citron said. “And what I really like about that’s people decide to spend money on our service once we’re creating loads of value for them.”
In an effort to create value for users, Discord is investing further into its Nitro subscription offering and rolling out additional tools for developers to bring their games to market. Most recently, it announced a latest software development kit called Discord Social SDK.