Messaging app Snapchat has grown like a weed to 100 million daily active users, while striking a series of video licensing deals to launch its Discover section. How is it funding all this? Not from the small-but-growing advertising revenues on Discover, that’s for sure. Yep: venture capital. An SEC filing from the company has revealed just how much cash it’s raising in 2015: $650m. The filing explains that Snapchat has raised $538m of that total already, with the Financial Times already having reported that Chinese internet giant Alibaba has chipped in $200m at a valuation of $15bn for Snapchat. Last week, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel talked openly about his company’s ambitions to go public: “We need to IPO,” he told the Code conference. “We have a plan to do that.” Raising hundreds of millions more funding to provide the necessary runway to that IPO is certainly part of that plan.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…