Snapchat close to raising as much as $100 million at a jaw-dropping valuation -- Tech News and Analysis

Published: 2013-06-07 21:15:14

Snapchat is a mobile service that allows you to send and receive photos or videos that sort-of-maybe disappear afterward. It raised $13.5 million in Series A funding from Instagram-backers Benchmark Capital. The company is based down in Los Angeles and has eschewed the Valley way to chart its own course.

The It girl of web services, Snapchat, is close to snagging about $100 million in new investment at a valuation nearing half a billion dollars, sources familiar with company’s fund raising efforts tell me.

My Two Cents

Snapchat the app that disappears your photos (mostly sort of). Now raising $100 million at approximately $500 million valuation. This is called the Disappearing Economy. Now if we can only get our phone calls and Internet browsing habits to disappear from Palantir and the NSA, then that should be worth so much more :).

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Think you can send content on your smartphone that won’t appear elsewhere? Evidence that your Snapchat videos can be retrieved without notifying the sender comes as further proof what people in the digital age are realizing -- true online privacy can be hard to come by.

CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel
in an interview earlier this month, he
just goofy pictures they don’t want posted for all eternity
sending explicit photos
Snapchat and our never ending quest for impermanance
sort-of-maybe disappear
Through a PRISM darkly: Tracking the ongoing NSA surveillance story
you can never really make anything disappear

Snapchat and our never ending quest for impermanance

The growth of apps like Snapchat, which allow users to set a time limit after which photos self-destruct, is seen by many as driven by “sexting.” But some users may simply be attracted by the idea of sharing content in a way that isn’t completely permanent.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about an application called Snapchat, both because of its phenomenal growth rate and because Facebook has quickly copied its functionality with its own app, known as Poke. The dominant feature of both apps is that the photos and video clips that users can share with friends have a built-in self-destruct -- in other words, they disappear (more or less) after a pre-determined number of seconds. While the conventional wisdom is that these apps are designed primarily for “sexting” between teenagers, I think they are part of a much larger phenomenon: namely, an almost unspoken desire for impermanence -- in retaliation for the way that most of our online behavior seems destined to follow us around for the rest of our lives.

because of its phenomenal growth rate
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most of our online behavior seems destined

the “Alive Web.”

it created a unique culture around the service

Elinor Glyn

raised $13.5 million

sort-of-maybe disappear


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