Twitter is continuing to prove it’s the king of all social media with this latest Silicon Valley rumor.
The so-called “bird app” is rumored to be in talks with the up-and-coming audio app, Clubhouse, for acquisition. If the acquisition is successful, the deal will be worth $4 billion.
Bloomberg News was the first to report on the rumored acquisition, and sources close to the situation confirmed the initial talks to TechCrunch. However, other sources suggest that there might be a bigger play at stake for Clubhouse.
You see, a few days ago, Clubhouse announced that they were seeking a new round of funding at a valuation of $4 billion. There’s a good chance that these latest Silicon Valley rumors surrounding Twitter’s alleged acquisition of the app are merely the San Francisco-based company’s way of tantalizing additional investors.
And this theory is bolstered by TechCrunch’s report that Twitter “folded” in the initial acquisition conversations.
Then there’s the issue of Twitter Spaces, which is currently being rolled out over the next few months, that serves as a counterpart to Clubhouse’s sole offering. But as Twitter rolls out more features — including Spaces — so, too, does Clubhouse, who recently announced that they’re offering Clubhouse Payments, a peer-to-peer payment network that allows content creators to receive money from their fans.
In short, there seems to be very little incentive, at this point, for Twitter to fully acquire Clubhouse — but there certainly seems to be a lot of incentives for outside investors to come in and get a piece of the action.
For what it’s worth, Crunchbase reports that Clubhouse has raised $110 million over the course of four funding rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan. 24, 2021, from a Series B round, which raised $100 million, and was led by Andreessen Horowitz — the same firm that led the initial Series A funding round.
