Clubhouse completes Series C financing with a valuation of US$4 billion

According to socialmediatoday, Clubhouse recently completed a Series C 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 bring the company's valuation to US$4 billion.

Clubhouse was launched for Apple users in March 2020 and is only available to users by invitation. Currently, the app has 10 million weekly active users and has been downloaded more than 13 million times in total, nearly a third of which 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 team to support global expansion , invest in the development of features such as localization and accessibility , launch a monetization plan similar to the "Creator Accelerator" , and invest deeply in the development of personalized recommendation functions in chat rooms.

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 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 content creators with more monetization and profit space, which is also the focus of the creator acceleration program announced by Clubhouse last month. At that time, Clubhouse announced that content creators participating in the program will be guaranteed a monthly income of no less than US$5,000.

The above improvements of Clubhouse are indeed imminent in a practical sense. In addition to the covetous eyes of social giants, there are still boring, chaotic, indulgent or scams in the product experience of Clubhouse voice chat rooms. For example, some chat rooms have no one talking, just for adding people to each other; some chat rooms spread vague ideas about entrepreneurship and becoming a millionaire, but in fact they may not be hosted by real millionaires.

In the early days, Clubhouse attracted a large number of users due to its novel gameplay, but it also attracted marketers and scammers, and then more brands that wanted to profit from advertising. Last week, it even broke the news that the personal data of 1.3 million users had been leaked, which weakened users' interest in Clubhouse itself, resulting in a decline in product experience and making it gradually become "indistinguishable from the crowd."

However, Clubhouse is not without a chance to turn things around in the face of numerous challenges . Many experts wrongly predicted that Snapchat would fail after the launch of Instagram Stories, which has similar functions, and TikTok has also flourished amid Facebook's imitation and suppression.

Therefore, Clubhouse may be able to maintain its market position with the support of capital. The future depends on how Clubhouse chooses to go.

Clubhouse