The ephemeral messaging app Snapchat has raised another $1.8 billion in a new Series F round of funding, showing positive investor interest in the company.
The details of the funding have been acquired via an SEC filing that states that the company has acquired the aforementioned amount in an equity offering. The company hasn’t revealed any valuation numbers in the latest round of funding, but TechCrunch has insider information that the funding took place at a $20 billion valuation.
TechCrunch has also got their hands on a leaked pitch deck which details the revenues and forecasts. The messaging app has been struggling to attract advertisers, but still has managed to bring in about $59 million in 2015. But, Snapchat is now revamping its business into a full-blown communication suite with the introduction of video and audio calling capabilities.
Sources have told the publication that Snapchat has raised the said funding on a rolling basis, wherein about $1.158 billion were raised in first five months of the current year and the rest amount has been poured in just recently. The ongoing funding has seen interest from a large pool of investors, including General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price, Lone Pine, Glade Brook Capital, IVP, and Fidelity.
If you’re unaware of the funding stats, Snapchat had recently received a $175 million investment from Fidelity at an overall valuation of $16 billion. Well, it was just a small part of the whole Series F round which is now supposedly complete with the latest $650 million investment, in addition to the $537 million that had been raised in the previous months.
The Los-Angeles based messaging application is still one of the top six venture-backed firms on the market. Snapchat is also planning to introduce changes to its Discover feature, the dedicated space for media giants to attract teenagers. The company will shift from a circular design to a much cleaner tiled Instagram-esque design to provide more territory to coveted advertisers.
Snapchat is fighting YouTube and Facebook to be the most popular youth-centric messaging application. It’s a battle-ground where Facebook has released their Live Video platform while YouTube is trying to embed an in-app messenger to keep users hooked onto their application.
