Snapchat raised $537.6 million in new venture capital funding, the company disclosed Friday in a regulatory filing. The ephemeral messaging service could raise as much as $650 million.
The $537.6 million was done in the form of common stock, and the first securities in the round were sold in February, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The filing does not state how much the stock sold for or name the buyers and sellers. Since its inception, Snapchat has raised more than $1 billion in outside funding, and has been said to be raising at a valuation of more than $15 billion.
Snapchat's CEO Evan Spiegel said earlier this week that the company has plans for an initial public offering and does not expect to consider any acquisition offers. Spiegel also said this week that the app is approaching 100 million daily active users in developed markets and that about 65% of those users create content on the app daily. More than 60 percent of 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are active on the service and together view more than 2 billion videos a day, the company said.
The popular service has been expanding as a media business since it launched the Discover portion of the app in January. Discover features a range of media brands such as
Snapchat began making revenue from advertisements this year, for example, through full-screen video ads that are about 10 seconds long.
