Picture and video messaging app Snapchat has raised US$60 million in venture capital despite not making any money from the service, which launched two years ago.
The company was valued at US$800 million from the funding round and the app currently has more than five million daily active users, reports All Things D.
Two hundred million photos and videos are sent every day on the platform which allows users to choose whether the receiver(s) can view them for between one and 10 seconds.
A Snapchat blogpost said: “Thanks to our incredible and hardworking team, we’ve been able to support the growth of Snapchat with minimal overhead.
“But in order to continue scaling while developing the Snapchat experience, we needed to build a bigger engineering team and figure out how to pay our server bills.”
The lead investor in Snapchat is Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and the company has also added Michael Lynton to its board as an independent member.
The blog added: “Michael is a remarkably talented and creative executive who believed in Snapchat way before it was cool. He is a tremendous role model and we are grateful for his time and energy.”
