Snapchat, the social media service that lets users keep their racy photos and their most intimate secrets from ending up on cyberspace forever, raised $486 million in funding, as it announced on New Years Eve, and as reported by the Financial Times and CNBC. The valuation for the company is currently at $10 billion and management must be quite glad, including Founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, that he didn’t take up Facebook’s offer to buy it for a measly $3 billion.
However, $3 billion might have seemed like a fair deal at the time. Snapchat’s meteoric rise is a sign of the times, as more startups are growing at at dizzying pace. Snapchat wouldn’t name the 23 investors that provided the $486 million, but some speculate that Yahoo and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers were involved. Imra Kahn, Credit Suisse tech banker, has been named as Snapchat’s chief strategic officer.
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It is ironic that a company specializing in keeping chats private suffered unwanted exposure during the Sony email hacking scandal. Evan Spiegel said he was “disappointed, ” when emails concerning the company’s future strategy were leaked; Sony’s Michael Lynton is a board member of Snapchat.
“We keep secrets because we get to do our work free from judgment, ” Spiegel wrote on Twitter, “I”m so sorry our work has been violated and exposed.”
