Clubhouse valuation hits $4 bn; faces competition

SAN FRANCISCO: As tech giants like Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, Discord and LinkedIn go after it, invite-only audio chat app Clubhouse has reportedly raised fresh funding in Series C round, taking its valuation to $4 billion.

According to TechCrunch, the new round of financing was led by Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from DST Global, Tiger Global and Elad Gil. “This round means Clubhouse has tripled the valuation it attained in January when Andreessen Horowitz led its Series B funding round,” the report said. Clubhouse which has which has reported 10 mn weekly active users said in a blog post that fresh funding will support the next round of growth for the app.

“While we’ve quadrupled the size of our team this year, stabilised our infrastructure, launched Payments in beta to help creators monetise, and readied Android for launch, there is so much more to do as we work to bring Clubhouse to more people around the world,” the company said.

“It’s no secret that our servers have struggled a bit these past few months, and that our growth has outpaced the early discovery algorithms our small team originally built,” it added.

Meanwhile, Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said it plans to launch audio products, including Clubhouse-style live audio rooms and a way for users to find and play podcasts. Facebook’s incursion into the audio market comes as the sudden explosion of interest in Clubhouse, the audio app where billionaires and celebrities including Tesla CEO Elon Musk have popped in to chat, could be waning. Downloads of the Clubhouse app, which is only available on Apple’s iOS devices, suffered an estimated 70% decline in downloads in March from February when it hit a high.