Snapchat may soon be the third-most-valuable startup in the world, behind Uber and China's Xiaomi.
Bloomberg is reporting that the mobile photo platform is seeking $500 million at a $16-$19 billion valuation, and that it's speaking with fund managers to close the new round.
The app raised $485 million late last year from a slew of investors, according to an SEC filing. That round reportedly valued the startup at $10 billion, although TechCrunch heard the post-money valuation was $20 billion. A new round of funding would bring the company's total amount raised to more than $1 billion.
The funding report comes on the heels of another rumor — that Snapchat wants to buy an expensive record label, Big Machine, which could cost an estimated $350 million. Big Machine represents Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel's former fling, Taylor Swift.
Since its founding in 2011, Snapchat's growth has continued to be strong. It could be approaching 200 million monthly active users and it has tens of millions of daily active users. In leaked emails between Spiegel and his board member Mitch Lasky, Spiegel revealed that Snapchat was approaching Twitter's mobile scale. "We have reached abnormal levels of growth," Spiegel wrote.
Snapchat has many users; it's not just a startup in growth mode anymore. It's trying to become a full-on platform, the same way Facebook expanded beyond profiles to things like Groups, Search, and Newsfeed. In January, Snapchat rolled out Discover, a partnership with a few major news sites, to publish content and videos on the app. It also launched an original video series, "Literally Can't Even," starring Stephen Spielberg's daughter. Working with recording artists and music labels would give Snapchat more original content to feature on the app to keep users logging in.
The company is also in hard-core monetization mode. It's using a revenue share model for its Discover product that will give Snapchat a significant chunk of any ad inventory it sells for publishers (about 40%). Spiegel is adamant that his company needs to figure out revenue sooner rather than later.
"For Snapchat to capitalize on market conditions in the next 3 years, it is imperative that we become a revenue-generating company," Spiegel wrote to Lasky in another email. "That will allow us to attract the best talent and prosper despite extreme scrutiny on traditional social media that will have failed to deliver on $$$ dreams." When Snapchat announced that it was going to start running ads on its platform, Snapchat wrote on its blog: "We need to make money."
Snapchat did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
