Discord

Discord is a proprietary freeware instant messaging and VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities ranging from gamers to educationand businesses. Discord specializes in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in web browsers. As of 21 July 2019, there are over 250 million users of the software.

History
The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. He eventually sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. Their first product was Fates Forever, released in 2014, which Citron anticipated to be the first MOBA game on mobile platforms, but it did not become commercially successful. However, during the development process, Citron noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends using available voice over IP (VoIP) software. He found that some VoIP options required players to type in IP addresses just to connect, while others were resource-heavy and had known security problems. This led the developers to develop a chat service that was much friendlier to use and based on more modern technology.

To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb's 9+ incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent.

Discord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name discordapp.com.According to Citron, the only area that they pushed Discord into was for the Redditcommunities, finding that many subreddit forums were replacing IRC servers with Discord ones. Discord became popular among esports and LAN tournament gamers, and other Twitch streamers.

The company raised an additional US$20 million in funding for the software in January 2016. This included an investment from American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate WarnerMedia. In 2019 they sold their share after WarnerMedia Investment Group was shut down following the AT&T acquisition.

In December 2018 the company announced it raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners.

In March 2020, Discord changed its motto from "Chat for Gamers" to "Chat for Communities and Friends". This was part of their response to an increase of users as a result of the 2019-20 COVID-19 outbreak, which also included the introduction of server templates.

In April 2020, Discord's Twitter username was changed from @discordapp to @discord. Later in May 2020, Discord changed its primary domain from discordapp.com to discord.com.

Starting in June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specificity to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions, revealing it new slogan "Your place to talk" and a revised website. Among other planned changes would be to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it uses within the client, improving the user onboarding experience, and increasing server capacity and reliability. The company announced it had received an addition US$100 million in investments to help with these changes.