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Snapchat Makes Messages Disappear, But Not Money, Raises $486 Million

 

File photo of Spiegel arriving at the Time 100 gala celebrating the magazine's naming of the 100 most influential people in the world for the past year,   in New York

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.”

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