Snap Officially Files to Go Public, Aims to Raise $3 Billion

Snapchat was built on disappearing content, but the company itself is sticking around.

Snap revealed it hopes to raise $3 billion through the IPO, which would give the company a valuation of at least $20 billion.

Snapchat, the company’s flagship product, has 158 million daily users, according to the filing, and 2.5 billion snaps are created daily. A typical user opens the app 18 times per day and uses it for close to half an hour in total per day.

Interestingly, Snap avoided mentions of the likes of Twitter and Facebook, instead pointing fingers at Apple and Google. In its “risks” section, Snap observed the two companies’ control over their respective app stores, noting how they could theoretically build competing apps and favor their own products, thus greatly damaging Snapchat’s capacity to grow.

Curiously, the company neglected to mention that it is being sued over intellectual property rights.

Snap’s current revenue numbers do not warrant its proposed valuation, which means investors must have tremendous faith in the company’s ability to grow users and revenues significantly in the next few years—or Snap, like its ephemeral messages, could disappear as quickly as it arrived.

https://borndigital.com/2017/02/02/ipo-look-snaps-numbers