What Is Clubhouse App And Why Is It Valued At $4 Billion?

The social media app Clubhouse announced on Sunday that it had closed a new round of financing, bringing its total value to $4 billion. It now has more than 10 million users, the company said.

Clubhouse, developed by Alpha Exploration Co., is an audio-chat social network that allows its members to drop in and out of various live audio chats depending on their interests.

"What if Twitter was a podcast you lived inside of?" Jordan Minor of PCMag said in describing the app.

Currently, Clubhouse is a by-invitation-only app and is only available on iOS. The new round of financing, which includes investments from Tiger Global Management and DST Global, may fuel international growth for the app.

"This will allow us to heavily scale our team to support international growth, invest in localization and accessibility features, launch more programs like the Creator First accelerator to help creators get paid, invest deeply in discovery to help people find the best rooms, and continue to scale our support and community health teams,” Clubhouse said in a blog post on Sunday.

The company did not share details about the amount the firms invested. However, it's likely to be more than the roughly $100 million Clubhouse raised in a previous funding round.

The invite-only app launched for Apple users in March 2020 and only had 1,500 users at that time .

User Installation of the app surged to 2 million in the days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk jumped on the platform to talk about cryptocurrency and other topics. A cameo by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg later led the app to crash under stress.

Clubhouse users also inlude Oprah Winfrey, Drake, MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher, and various Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

On April 6, the company partnered with Stripe to create a payment system that would monetize the content of creators.

Clubhouse has seen a growing number of competitors, including Facebook and Twitter. The latter held talks with Clubhouse about a potential $4 billion buyout but those have since been stalled, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, founders of Clubhouse, had been building the social network separately for 10 years. Prior to their partnership, Davison built the location-sharing app Highlight, while Seth helped Google improve its Maps app.