Over the past couple months, the rumor mill on the interwebs has been going berzerk over the impending public offering of Snap Inc., the parent company for ephemeral messaging app Snapchat. Well, their wait has most likely come to fruition. According to fresh reports from Bloomberg, Snap Inc. has finally filed for its IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company is expected to launch its
With this public offering, the company expects to raise as much as $4 billion, which would swell its valuation to somewhere in the ballpark of $25 to $35 billion. This valuation of the company falls in line with previous reports and its recent fund-raising. This would also make it the most-valued technology IPO since the debut of Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba a couple years ago. Alibaba broke records with its $170 billion initial offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
Snap Inc. recently spun-off from being just a software-focused company behind the wildly popular ephemeral messaging app Snapchat to a more hardware-focused approach with the launch of its video recording ‘Spectacles.’ Snap Inc., previously known as Snapchat, now refers to itself as a camera company and is showing positive signs of aggressively shifting to hardware with the setting up of minion-like Spectacle dispensers called ‘Snap bots.’ This is currently the only way of snatching up a pair of these $130 video recording spectacles and they are just pure awesomeness and fun.
The company, as reported by Reuters, had confidentially begun filing for its public offering before the unexpected outcome of the U.S presidential elections. Since Snap Inc. has been able to file for the IPO confidentially under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, it confirms to us that the revenue of the company is still under a billion dollars.
Companies with revenue less than $1 billion are the only ones who can secretly file for an IPO while keeping their financials under wraps until they go the market. This also enables them to quietly test the investor appetite and demand for their service in the market. The app is extremely popular among millennial population and has amassed a whopping 150 million daily active users, which is said to be more than those of the suffering micro-blogging platform Twitter.
And with Donald Trump being elected as the U.S President, tech companies are laying extreme emphasis on security and privacy of its users. And Snapchat is planning to market its ephemeral messaging features to attract even more investors to its impending IPO. The anonymous messaging app Secret has also planned to make an unexpected return after the announcement of this election result. It had previously shut down in early 2015 due to differences in product vision and multiple personnel departures.
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