Snapchat, one of the growing mobile messaging services, which raised $60 million at an $800 million valuation in a fundraising round recently, is yet again ready with plans to ponder upon a bigger fundraising round.
The mobile messaging start-up has plans to raise around $200 million at a valuation of $3 to $4 billion considering interest from deep-pocketed and big techie investors, sources close to the matter reported. The Venice, California based company in the process of assessing how many shares does the company need to offer and how much will come from its employees and early investors.
It is worth noting that since two years large number of mobile messaging apps have spawned and have managed to garner huge userbase – some of the best examples would be Line and WhatsApp. Line, an Asian messaging app, which has successfully grown up to have a base of more than 270 million users, is also up with IPO plans.
Snapchat, which allows users to share messages that disappear after a few seconds, was not making money until last year. But this year proved to be a good year for the app with more and more users herding to the service. The app processed some 350 million “snaps,” or messages per day as compared to 200 million in June. School students, teenagers and young adults constitute the app’s major user base.
Evan Spiegel, Co-founder and CEO Snapchat, is showing interest in the advertising sector as well and is also hopeful of generating maximum revenue before Snapchat’s next funding round. The company is also launching new products and features like Stories, which allows users to share several moments, or “stories,” with friends that last for 24 hours.
Amid Snapchat’s growing popularity, several key institutional investors are keeping an eye on the company. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had once approached the mobile massaging company in an attempt to acquire it to discuss an acquisition above $1 billion. However, Spiegel rejected Facebook’s acquisition approach as he was not interested in selling his messaging service to the social network, reported The Wall Street Journal.
