NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
O.M.G: Snapchat takes a staggering $650m Series F on a $16b valuation
In a case of a Unicron gone wild, Snapchat, Inc. has raised a new round of a staggering $650 million Series F on a valuation of $16 billion.
Never shy of a pile of money, Snapchat’s last round closed in March and came in at $200 million Series E on a $15 billion valuation.
According to reports, Snapchat is looking to invest in social commerce.
Snapchat, which provides a private chat messaging service, has been doing extremely well since launching in September 2011, and numbers have been going well: as of August 2014 they had 100 million active monthly users with 700 million snaps being sent each day. Famously it turned down an acquisition offer of $3 billion by Facebook, Inc. in November 2013.
The company has been expanding into to new areas this year, and in January it launched its “Discover” service, a curated content service that pitched itself as a place where “editors and artists, not clicks and shares determine what’s important” and yet provided content from The Daily Mail and People.
Nearly six months later the service has (surprisingly) been well received, with Spotify claiming that they’ve had over 2 billion video views.
The most insane Unicorn of them all
I may not be the target market, and indeed as a member of Generation X I’m definitely not, but a $16 billion valuation on a chat service that’s most famous for the fact that underage teens send nude pictures to themselves, and they promptly disappear, doesn’t quite justify the drug f**ked Unicorn valuation times 16.
Sure, SnapChat has gone into media, with deals that allow their users to read content from various parties; why, I’m not sure how anyone over 30 gets the why, but from some reports it’s going half ok.
Their numbers, to be fair, with users are highly impressive, but the company has still not worked out how to make a quid out of them and dare I say, they may never will.
The froth and bubble of the second great dot-com bubble is in full swing, and as much as many of us wouldn’t like to see it crash, Snapchat will be one of the first to go.
Including the new round, Snapchat has raised a beyond insane now $1.498 billion to-date. Investors include Tencent Holdings, SV Angel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark, General Catalyst Partners, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP,) and others.
Image credit: pestoverde/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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