Clubhouse is ready to take center stage. The San Francisco-based social network announced Sunday that it raised nearly $100 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to Axios. Although the deal was publicly announced, financial details were not disclosed.
Clubhouse might be one of the Bay Area’s fastest-growing unicorns. The company reached an estimated value of $1 billion following its latest investment.
Frequented by celebrities of stage, screen and Silicon Valley, the audio-based social app has recently taken the world by storm. When the company launched nine months ago, just 1,500 users had access to its drop-in chat platform. At the time, the company was valued at $100 million.
After word of the illusive app spread to the far corners of Twitter, hype continued to grow. Today, nearly two million users are chatting it up on Clubhouse. The company plans to use the additional capital to scale in response to increased demand.
“Our goal was to build a social experience that felt more human — where instead of posting, you could gather with other people and talk,” Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, co-founders of Clubhouse, wrote in a blog post. “Our north star was to create something where you could close the app at the end of the session feeling better than you did when you opened it, because you had deepened friendships, met new people and learned.”
What began as an app for those in the VC world to connect with one another and talk shop has now expanded to include conversations between musicians, scientists, athletes, authors, artists and more.
While Clubhouse eventually aims to make its app accessible to everyone, prospective users currently require an invite from an existing one or they have to join a waitlist.
“The thing we love most is how voice can bring people together,” Davison and Seth continued. “No matter where you live in the world or what networks you have access to, in Clubhouse you can be in the room — often with people whose lived experience has been very different from your own.”
In the coming months, the company plans to launch tipping, ticketing and subscription features so that Clubhouse users have the option to get paid for the knowledge that they share. The company also announced it would soon begin work on an Android-friendly version of its app.
In addition to expanding the size of its user base, Clubhouse is looking to expand the size of its team. The company is now hiring for seven open positions at its San Francisco office. Available roles span the company’s customer success and engineering teams.
