ARK Venture x Discord

With the seventh private investment in the ARK Venture Fund, the team at ARK has secured an investment in Discord. 

Founded by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy in 2015, Discord is a communications platform that enables its 231 million monthly active users (MAUs) to communicate via text, audio, and video. 

Discord allows a wide range of customization, which enables the platform to service a wide range of communication needs, from small-group casual socialization to enterprise collaboration. 

Discord is quite popular with younger generations today, particularly amongst the video gaming community. ARK estimates that the global number of digital gamers stands at ~3.2 billion in 2022, and if you assume that every Discord user is a gamer (they’re not), that would equate to only ~7% of gamers engaging with Discord. ARK believes if Discord can win more mindshare from the gamer community, it could lead to significant upside for the business.

The ARK team also believes that Discord’s use cases beyond socialization for video gamers should continue to gain traction with creators, subculture enthusiasts (technology, crypto/web3, etc) and communities across various fields of interest. 

The pandemic may have accelerated the shift in consumers spending more time online, but the ARK team believes this trend will continue to persist well into the future. In other words, it’s still early, and ARK believes Discord is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend.

Tier 1 venture investors like Benchmark, Index Ventures and FirstMark Capital have also invested in Discord in the past, so investors in the ARK Venture Fund are in good company.

You can read ARK’s full Discord thesis on the ARK Venture strategy page, and we’ll continue to provide updates as the ARK team continues to build out the Fund’s private investments.

Disclosures:

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