According to the Sina Technology News on June 25, 2013, SnapChat has announced it has closed its $60 million dollar Series B round of venture funding.

The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with participation from General Catalyst Partners and SV Angel, and continued pro-rata participation from Benchmark Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and this will valued the company at $800 million pre-money. With the new round, the company has raised around $75 million to date.

Like Us on Facebook

Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of Snapchat, said in an interview "this is almost all about scaling for us, we're using the money mostly for server builds and hiring purposes, we've been adding awesome engineers at a nice clip so far, but we were at a place where we weren't able to innovate as fast as we wanted to. This will let us do that."

Snapchat is a photo messaging application developed by four Stanford University students. It is an app for the smartphone; users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients by using the app. When users send the photos for their recipients, they need to set a time limit (up to 10 seconds) for how long the viewer can see the photos, after the recipients have view the photos, the photos will disappear from their device and deleted from the company's servers.

The CEO of Sony Corporation of America and Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, is also a big fan of Snapchat for over a year. According to the news, Lynton will join Snapchat's board as an independent member.