Snapchat Seeks £12 Billion Valuation

Snapchat is scouting out a round of funding which could value the company at nearly £13bn ($19bn), a source close to the matter has told Bloomberg.

Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app which deletes photos automatically after they have been sent, is seeking out £325m ($500m) of funding, with company execs reportedly in ‘advanced discussions’.

Whatsapp competition

Snapchat was founded in 2011, and 24-year-old CEO Even Spiegel turned down a $3bn acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013. Spiegel in turn raised funds from a £6.5bn ($10bn) valuation in 2014. Facebook instead bought messaging service WhatsApp for £14.3bn ($22bn).

To warrant the funding requests, Snapchat is working on new features which will help attract users and sell adverts. A feature called Discover was launched in January, which shows short videos from channels such as Comedy Central, Vice, and Yahoo News.

Up to 13 gigabytes’ worth of personal videos and pictures of Snapchat users were leaked online last year, after hackers compromised a third-party platform used to access the service.

Around 200,000 accounts were believed to have been affected by the leak, many of whom were likely to have been teenagers, since half of Snapchat’s montly user base of 200 million is between the ages of 13 and 17.

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