Clubhouse Completes Series C Financing, Valued At US$4 Billion

According to the socialmediatoday website, Clubhouse recently completed a Series C round of financing led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and reiterated its intention to release an Android version of the application, but did not disclose the amount of its financing. According to people familiar with the matter, the new financing will value the company at $4 billion.

Clubhouse was launched for Apple users in March 2020 and is only available to invited users. Currently, the application has 10 million weekly active users, and the total number of downloads has exceeded 13 million, of which nearly 1/3 were downloaded in the United States, with 1.3 million downloads in March alone.

Clubhouse announced that it will use this round of financing to expand the size of its team to support global expansion, invest in the development of features such as localization and accessibility, launch a monetization program similar to the "Creator Accelerator", and deeply invest in the development of personalized recommendations for chat rooms. Function.

It is reported that Clubhouse is already available in 154 of the 175 countries where Apple’s App Store operates, but it is currently only available in English and has not launched personalized services for individual countries or regions.

The above-mentioned investment projects cover the key elements that Clubhouse is currently focusing on. In order to retain customers and cope with competition from social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, Clubhouse needs to continue to provide customers with high-quality and unique services and provide more room for monetization and profit for content creators. This was also the case for Clubhouse last month. Highlights from announced Creator Acceleration Program. At that time, Clubhouse announced that content creators participating in the program would be guaranteed a monthly income of no less than $5,000.

The above improvements of Clubhouse are indeed urgent in a practical sense. In addition to the eye-catching gaze of social giants, there are still situations where the product experience of Clubhouse voice chat rooms is boring, confusing, indulgent or scammed. For example, there are chat rooms where no one talks, just for adding people to each other; there are chat rooms where vague ideas about entrepreneurship and becoming a millionaire are spread, but may not actually be hosted by real millionaires.

Clubhouse attracted a large number of users in the early days due to its novel gameplay, and also attracted marketers and scammers to get involved. Then more brands wanted to profit from advertising, and even last week it was revealed that the personal data of 1.3 million of its users had been stolen. The leakage problem has weakened users' interest in Clubhouse itself, led to a decline in product experience, and made it gradually become "obsolete".

However, in the face of many challenges, Clubhouse is not without opportunities to make a comeback. Many experts wrongly predicted that Snapchat would fail after the launch of Instagram Stories with similar functions, and TikTok also thrived amidst Facebook's imitation and suppression.

Therefore, Clubhouse may also be able to maintain its market position with the support of capital. The future depends on what Clubhouse does.