Discord Facts: Founding, Owners, Value and Status

People search for Discord facts for all sorts of reasons. A rumour says the app is closing. A friend claims Microsoft bought it. Someone wants to know why their Nitro badge changed colour, or why the desktop app keeps showing a QR code. This page collects the answers in one place, with dates and sources for every number.

Company figures for a private business are estimates, so each one below says who reported it and when. Where we could not confirm something, we left it out.

When was Discord made?

Discord came out of a games studio. Jason Citron sold his earlier company, OpenFeint, to GREE in 2011 and used the money to start Hammer & Chisel in 2012. The studio made a mobile game called Fates Forever, released in 2014. The game did not take off, but the team noticed how poor the voice and text chat tools for gamers were.

Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy built a chat app to fix that, and Discord was released publicly in May 2015 at the domain discordapp.com. By Citron's own account it started with a handful of daily users. In January 2016 it raised $20 million in a round that included Time Warner's investment arm.

A few later milestones that shaped the app you use now:

• 2023: Discord dropped four-digit tags like name#1234 and moved to unique usernames. Our Discord username lookup guide explains how that changed finding people.
• April 2025: Citron stepped down as CEO. Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive and president of King, took over on April 28, 2025, as Engadget reported. Citron stayed on the board, and Vishnevskiy remained CTO.
• January 2026: Discord filed confidentially for an IPO (more on that below).

Discord ownership: who owns Discord?

Discord Inc. is a private, venture-backed company based in San Francisco. No single parent company owns it. Its shares are held by its founders, employees and investors. Investors named in public funding reports include Greenoaks Capital and Index Ventures, which led a December 2020 round, and Dragoneer Investment Group, which led the 2021 round.

Two common myths:

• "Microsoft owns Discord." It does not. In March 2021 Bloomberg reported that Microsoft was in talks to buy Discord for more than $10 billion. In April 2021 the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord had ended sale talks with Microsoft and other suitors and was looking at an IPO instead.
• "Discord is already a public company." Not as of October 2026. On January 6, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Discord had filed confidentially with the SEC, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan working on the listing. A confidential filing is not a listing, and Bloomberg noted the company could still decide not to go ahead. At the time of writing Discord has not announced a listing date.

Discord net worth and valuation

There is no official "Discord net worth" figure, because private companies do not publish one. What exists are valuations from funding rounds and, more recently, prices from secondary-market trading in its shares. Here is how those figures have moved, with who reported each one:

When	Figure	Source of the figure
December 2020	About $7 billion	Funding round led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures, as reported at the time
March 2021	More than $10 billion	Microsoft acquisition talks, reported by Bloomberg; no deal was made
September 2021	About $15 billion	Funding round led by Dragoneer, widely reported in 2021
July 2026	Roughly $8.5 billion (implied)	Secondary-market pricing from Forge Global, as cited by IPO trackers in mid-2026

Treat the last line with care. Secondary trades are thin and do not set an official price. The real number will only be known if Discord prices an IPO.

On scale, Reuters reported in January 2026 that Discord has more than 200 million monthly users, citing a company statement from December 2025.

Discord shutdown: rumours vs facts

Every so often a post goes viral saying Discord is shutting down on a set date. None of them have been true. The pattern is usually the same: something real happens near Discord, and the story grows in the retelling.

• August 2023: "RIP Discord" posts spread after Discord.io, a separate third-party service for custom invite links, shut down following a data breach. Discord itself was not affected, and Tech Times called the rumours untrue.
• October 2024: Two countries really did cut off access. Russia's regulator Roskomnadzor blocked Discord on October 8, 2024, citing violations of local law, and a Turkish court ordered a block the same week. The Record covered both. These were national blocks, not a shutdown. Discord kept running everywhere else.
• Outages: When Discord goes down for an hour, someone always asks if it is gone for good. It is just an outage. See the server status section below.

If you see a shutdown claim, check Discord's own blog or its official social accounts. A real change of that size would be announced there first, not in a forwarded message asking you to "share before it's deleted".

What is the highest Discord Nitro rank?

Nitro does not have ranks in the gaming sense. There are two paid plans, Nitro Basic and Nitro, and Nitro is the higher one. What people usually mean by "rank" is the profile badge.

According to Discord's help article on evolving Nitro badges, every Nitro subscriber gets a badge, and it changes design as you reach subscription milestones. Your profile always shows the latest milestone you have reached. A few rules from that article:

• Only full Nitro has the evolving badge. Nitro Basic and Nitro Classic do not.
• If your subscription ends, you keep the badge until the end of the billing cycle. After that, progress resets and starts again from the beginning if you resubscribe.
• You cannot pick which design to show, and you cannot hide the badge.
• Discord Support cannot restore lost badge progress.

So the highest Nitro "rank" is simply the final milestone badge, reached by keeping full Nitro active without a break for the longest time. Discord shows the milestone ladder as an image rather than text, and third-party lists put the top step at around six years. To see where you are, hover over the badge on your profile on desktop, or check the Nitro tab under Direct Messages.

Discord on iOS

The Discord iOS app is free on Apple's App Store for iPhone and iPad. It covers the same core features as desktop: servers, DMs, voice and video calls, and account settings. Nitro can be bought or managed from the app.

The mobile app also does one job the desktop app cannot: it is the scanner for QR code login. That matters for the last section of this page. On iOS, Discord's settings live behind your profile picture in the bottom-right corner, then the cogwheel.

Discord server status: is Discord down?

Discord publishes live service health at discordstatus.com. It lists the main components, such as the API, voice and media, with any open incidents and planned maintenance. If the page shows everything as operational but Discord will not load for you, the problem is more likely your connection, your network blocking Discord, or the app itself.

Quick checks before you assume an outage:

1. Open Discord in a browser at discord.com/app. If the browser works and the app does not, restart or update the app.
2. Switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data to rule out your network.
3. Check the status page again in a few minutes. Discord posts updates as incidents progress.

"Server status" can also mean an individual Discord server, like a community you joined. That is up to its owners. If one server vanishes while others work, it may have been deleted or you may have been removed.

How to scan a QR code on Discord from a PC

This catches a lot of people out. You do not scan the QR code with your PC. The PC shows the code, and you scan it with Discord on your phone, which then logs the PC in. Discord's QR code login FAQ gives these steps:

1. Make sure you are logged in to the Discord mobile app.
2. On the PC, open the Discord desktop app or discord.com in a browser. The login screen shows a QR code.
3. On your phone, tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner, then the cogwheel to open User Settings.
4. Scroll to Account Settings and tap Scan QR Code, then point the camera at the code on your PC screen.
5. Tap Log in on the phone to approve, or Cancel if you did not start this.

Each code lasts two minutes, so refresh the PC screen if it expires. Discord notes that your phone's normal camera app can read the code too and will hand off to Discord for approval.

One safety rule from the same article: never approve a QR login you did not start yourself. Scammers send QR codes and ask people to "verify" by scanning them, which logs the scammer into your account. If you approve one by mistake, change your Discord password, which logs out every device. Our checklist for securing your accounts covers two-factor authentication and recovery details.

Checking a Discord username

If you are here because you are setting up a new Discord account, test your preferred name first. The Discord username checker shows the platform's rules and whether a name is taken, and our free username search checks the same handle across 3,165+ sites so you can grab it everywhere at once. If you want to understand usernames, user IDs and profile links, read Discord username vs user ID.

WhatsMyName Apps is not affiliated with Discord. Discord is a trademark of its owner.