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four years pass...
from the FT’s “six businesses finding an upside in the pandemic”
Discord is the kind of app that would normally drive teachers crazy. A gaming-focused way to chat using text, voice and video, it already had 300m registered users and tens of millions of daily users before the pandemic hit.
Then in March, just as Zoom was taking over the corporate videoconferencing world, Discord found an unlikely new role as a home schooling aid.
In France, state-provided online education tools struggled as traffic surged in the early days of the lockdown. Discord was able to handle the influx of users much better, making it a de facto alternative for many teachers.
According to App Annie, which tracks app stores, Discord jumped into the top 10 most downloaded iPhone apps in France during March, with similar growth in Spain and Germany.
By mid-May, it remains in the top 50 mobile apps overall in the US and several European countries, in many cases ranking above more established rivals such as Skype, Twitch and Google Meet.
That is no mean feat for a five-year-old start-up. Like Slack, the business messaging app that began as a side project of a video game called Glitch, Discord’s founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy started out building a games development studio, Hammer & Chisel, before moving into messaging.
The business has raised about $280m in private financing so far and is said to be in talks to raise new funds at a valuation that could exceed $3bn.
It is also racing to update its product to capitalise on the new demand beyond its core audience. In March, it increased the number of people who could watch a “Go Live” broadcast from 10 to 50, making it more useful for teachers.
― Fizzles, Monday, 1 June 2020 05:35 (three years ago) link
two years pass...