According to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters, Discord is preparing for its stock market debut, having confidentially filed with the SEC the documentation for an IPO expected by the end of March 2026.
Unlike traditional IPOs, where everything is public, Discord has chosen a confidential approach, allowing it to test investor appetite without immediately revealing all financial data and maintaining flexibility on timing.
Discord is a free app where people create “servers” (virtual rooms) to chat via text, voice, or video. Founded in 2015 by Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy for gamers who wanted to communicate during matches, it has become popular far beyond gaming. Today, it’s used for study groups, collaborations among artists, internal and organizational communication in a wide range of companies, and discussions among enthusiasts of particular topics.
In 2024, 45% of newly created servers were created for non-gaming communities, but despite this, Discord has always had a major problem: how to make money from a service that users expect for free, faced with extremely high costs (servers for voice/video, internet bandwidth), and without inserting traditional advertising that would alienate hardcore customers?
Over the years, various subscription tiers have been introduced, server boosting (customers pay to enhance servers), the ability for creators to sell subscriptions to their channels (Discord takes 10%), and the first real advertising experiment, Quests. Users watch/stream specific games and receive in-game rewards.
However, Discord earns only $3.60 per user per year, compared, for example, to Spotify’s $25/user, Netflix’s $150/user, and Meta’s $40/user.
In 2021, Discord reached its peak valuation in the secondary market at $15 billion, before falling to about $10 billion in 2024. The same year, there were talks of a deal between Discord and one of the largest SP500 heatmap players, Microsoft, but they were eventually halted.
Like every tech startup, Discord is currently not profitable, with losses reaching $66 million in 2022, which grew in subsequent quarters (from $6M to $11M in Q1 2022-2023). While not particularly concerning for companies of this type in the startup phase, investors will eventually expect profits.
After laying off 17% of employees in 2024 to increase profit margins, Jason Citron stepped aside as CEO (remaining as chairman) in 2025, replaced by Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive. A signal that may be viewed as a desire for an experienced manager to navigate the Discord IPO and post-listing phase.
What to expect from the IPO?
The general appetite for tech IPOs improved significantly in 2025, with $15.6 billion raised, roughly double that of 2024. Discord will need to demonstrate it can increase monetization per user without excessively compromising user experience through invasive advertising. Born for gamers, this is still its DNA, but it’s not enough to achieve revenues sufficient to cover the enormous operational costs with the services it currently provides. The bet is to improve gaming services and also challenge direct competitors in the workspace arena, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, which are currently the market leaders. The initial post-IPO choices will be crucial to ensure its optimal valuation.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
