Snapchat is poised to join a storied circle of startups including Airbnb, Dropbox and Uber that boast billion dollar valuations in the double digits.
The ephemeral messaging app is in talks with investors -- notably among them Chinese Internet titan Alibaba -- for a new funding round that could value the company at $10 billion, Bloomberg reports.
Dropbox and Airbnb are both valued at $10 billion as well, while Uber shattered records for a valuation from a direct funding round in June totaling $1.2 billion, which rocketed the car-sharing company’s value to $18.2 billion.
Snapchat, which said its rapidly growing user base sends more than 700 million fleeting messages every day, added new disappearing text messaging and video conversation capabilities in May.
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Despite a legal clash with the Federal Trade Commission -- which ruled that Snapchat messages did not “disappear forever” as advertised, and that it had clandestinely collected user data -- Snapchat has been a hot-button property in the scorching mobile messaging space.
The company’s founder, Evan Spiegel, famously rebuffed a $3 billion acquisition by Facebook last year, which in turn led the social network to develop its own Snapchat competitor, Slingshot.
Alibaba, for its part, has been known to invest in messaging apps before. It led a round in March for the free messaging platform Tango with a $215 million tender. The company, which is expected to have one of the largest U.S.-based IPOs of all time, also tendered $250 million in the latest financing round for car-sharing service, Lyft.