Perhaps the most interesting story to emerge from the venture capital slowdown and stock market correction that began in late 2021 is the rejiggering of unicorn valuations.
Instacart and Stripe picked up new, lower 409a valuations. Klarna got repriced via an equity round, and other richly funded startups that raised last year are staring down the prospects of either flat or down rounds as 2022 continues.
And then there’s Discord, which raised $500 million last year at a massive $14.7 billion valuation, per PitchBook data. The chat-focused software company, which previously turned down an exit to Microsoft for around $10 billion, then saw its valuation fall, according to Fidelity calculations. (The U.S. investing house, which mostly focuses on publicly traded equities, owns some Discord stock in its Contrafund, giving us regular looks at how Fidelity values it.)
As Insider first reported, Fidelity recently cut its valuation for its Discord shares. Is that reduction fair? Today we’re digging into Discord’s price change per Fidelity numbers and what we know about its growth trajectory, and then we’ll close with a comparison of the public markets to the company’s changing worth.
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If Fidelity’s cut is fair, Discord will still retain decacorn status, membership in the somewhat rarified club of private companies worth $10 billion or more. But we may find that Discord is cheap at Fidelity’s new mark, or that it is expensive yet, which would bode ill for not just the well-known communications service favored by gamers, but for a host of other unicorns as well.
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