Clubhouse secures more funding from Andressen Horowitz; plans for creator payments

Just we reported on the investors rush for Clubhouse, the audio-app social media newbie announced that it secured more funding from Andressen Horowitz. Andressen Horowitz led the initial investment in the company last year valuing it at $100 million.

According to the Clubhouse team in their words, the funds will be used to make the product better each day and to help creators on Clubhouse thrive:

• Welcoming more amazing people ?   From the earliest days, we’ve wanted to build Clubhouse for everyone. With this in mind, we are thrilled to begin work on our Android app soon, and to add more accessibility and localization features so that people all over the world can experience Clubhouse in a way that feels native to them.
• Keeping the servers up ??‍?   We’ve grown faster than expected over the past few months, causing too many people to see red error messages when our servers are struggling. A large portion of the new funding round will go to technology and infrastructure to scale the Clubhouse experience for everyone, so that it’s always fast and performant, regardless of how many people are joining.
• Ensuring you get fast support ⚡️   User safety has always been a top priority for us, and as we welcome more people, it will remain one. This means scaling up our Trust & Safety and Support teams as we grow, continuing to invest in advanced tools to detect and prevent abuse, and increasing the features and training resources available to moderators. We’ll also be aggressively growing our support team so that everyone’s clubs can get same-day approval. 🙂
• Improving ranking and discovery ?   As we’ve grown, the number of conversations happening on Clubhouse has skyrocketed, and it’s our job to help you find the right ones each time you open the app. With this new round of funding we’ll be investing heavily in discovery so that we can show you people, clubs, and rooms that are perfectly tailored to your interests—and help you discover new rooms you never would have thought to look for.
• Investing in creators ??‍?   Creators are the lifeblood of Clubhouse, and we want to make sure that all of the amazing people who host conversations for others are getting recognized for their contributions. Over the next few months, we plan to launch our first tests to allow creators to get paid directly—through features like tipping, tickets or subscriptions. We will also be using a portion of the new funding round to roll out a Creator Grant Program to support emerging Clubhouse creators.

According to Andrew Chen of Andressen Horowitz in a blog post, “we believe Clubhouse will be a meaningful addition to the world, one that increases empathy and provides new ways for people to talk to each other (at a time when we need it more than ever).”

“Clubhouse could not have come at a better time for social media. It reinvents the category in all the right ways, from the content consumption experience to the way people engage each other, while giving power to its creators,” he adds.

“We look forward to partnering with the Clubhouse team and helping build its community, product, and business. There’s a lot still to do to bring Clubhouse to every corner of the world and continually broaden the topics people might want to speak to or listen to. It’s going to be an exciting ride.”

While the app is only an invite-only app, the Clubhouse team says they are working hard to scale the app as fast as they can and open it up to everyone soon.

I hope pretty soon.