(note bald head)
From Clubhouse
Back in January we announced that we had raised our Series B — so that we could welcome more users, scale our infrastructure, and double down on supporting our creators.
Since then we have grown faster than expected, as Clubhouse has expanded across hundreds of countries around the world. With millions of new users bouncing around the hallways, we’ve witnessed all sorts of magical and unlikely collisions — from Platon and Edward Snowden auctioning artwork, to impromptu #stopasianhate fundraisers, to small intimate rooms around the world going late into the night, where people from all cultures have come together to meet for the first time. We’ve held Town Halls in Italy and Brazil, watched the surge of pro-democracy movements, and sat together in silence as Ai Weiwei’s Commemoration art project honored the lives of students who died in the Wenchuan earthquake. The breadth and variety seems to grow every day, and it’s the most exciting thing we’ve ever been a part of.
While we’ve quadrupled the size of our team this year, stabilized our infrastructure, launched Payments in beta to help creators monetize, and readied Android for launch, there is so much more to do as we work to bring Clubhouse to more people around the world. 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.
With that in mind, we are excited to share that we have closed a new Series C round of financing — led by Andrew Chen at a16z, with participation from major investors DST Global, Tiger Global, and Elad Gil. 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....
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