Just 25 months after it launched, Snapchat, the app that lets you share photos that self-destruct, has raised $60 million at a pre-money valuation of $800 million.
Snapchat is widely known as the "sexting" app. Basically, it lets you share a picture with someone and that picture is automatically deleted within 10 seconds of their looking at it.
The investment is the latest big news in tech and startup land, which has recently been particularly full of high-profile investments and acquisitions, including, most recently, Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion and Google's acquisition of mapping app Waze for the same figure. Those are big, big numbers for companies that don't make much—if any—money.
The Snapchat raise seems perfectly engineered to fuel bloviation about whether we're in the middle of a tech bubble. The chatter on that subject really got going last year after Facebook bought another photo-sharing app, Instagram, for 10 figures, and has certainly been fueled by the implosion of several high-flyers, including Zynga and Groupon.
Here's the thing though: Snapchat actually hosts more photos than Instagram (and it's catching up to Facebook, too). And apparently, stuff other than sexting is going on. So maybe it is worth all that money. Of course, the raise is also perfectly suited to fuel the growing conjecture that Facebook is on its way out, too.
So, what do you think ... are we in a tech bubble? Is Facebook over?
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