Snapchat Net Worth: Lawsuits and a Huge Valuation Cut

Launched in 2011, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., went public just a few years later and grew rapidly to a $100 billion valuation over the course of a decade before a drastic drop.

In November 2024, Snapchat’s net worth is $18.63 billion.

Our team of experts at Business2Community has organized this full guide to Snapchat’s net worth and company history. Studying the trajectory of its growth and how it weathered challenges and market upturns gives you a better idea of the ups and downs of the tech innovator.

What is Snapchat’s Net Worth?

As of November 2024, Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, has a net worth, or market cap, of $18.63 billion with 1.68 billion shares outstanding and a stock price of $11.11 per share.

After gaining almost instant success following its launch in 2011 and rejecting Mark Zuckerberg’s acquisition offer in 2013, Snap went public in March 2017 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol SNAP.

Its IPO raised $3.40 billion, selling 200 million shares of Class A common stock at $17 per share. On its first day of trading, its stock price went up by 44% to $24.48 per share, placing Snapchat’s market cap at $33 billion.

It outperformed many other tech IPOs – including Facebook, which only gained 0.61% on its first day of trading in 2012 – during the same period. Its entire 200 million shares in the offering changed hands, contributing to 10% of the total trading volume on the NYSE that day.

From 2017 to early 2020, Snap’s net worth fluctuated around the $20 billion mark. Then, during the global pandemic, stuck-at-home users began using social media much more frequently. Together with the rise of the creator economy and Snapchat’s recent Explore features, Snap saw an 18% year-to-year increase in daily active users, up to 249 million in 2020.

In March 2020, Snap’s market cap was $17 billion. Six months later, it had risen to $50 billion. It then doubled in only 4 months to $100 billion in February 2021 and peaked at $131.41 billion in September that year.

Unfortunately for Snap, it wasn’t able to sustain its market-leading growth due to several reasons. Since late 2021, its net worth has been on a downward spiral. Apple changed its privacy policy that year, making it incredibly difficult for Snap to track user activities and deliver personalized ads, which significantly affected its performance.

In August 2022, Snapchat announced that it was cutting its workforce by 20% and put the company in cost-cutting mode. Its gloomy outlook worried investors, causing Snap’s market cap to drop by nearly $100 billion from its peak a year previous to $18 billion in September 2022.

The company announced plans to fire another 10% of its workforce – around 500 staff members – in early 2024. Its stock is yet to bounce back. In June 2024, it had $3 billion in cash and $3.6 billion in debt, worse than its mid-2022 figures of $4.9 billion in cash and $3.7 billion in debt. Investors continued to be prudent about the underperforming stock. As of November 2024, Snap’s net worth is $18.63 billion.

Snap’s financial year ends on December 31 with a full report available on its website within the next 3 months. It has never paid and does not intend to pay dividends in the foreseeable future to retain earnings for expansion plans, as stated in its 2023 Annual Report.

Snapchat’s Revenue

In 2017, the year Snap Inc. went public, it recorded a revenue of $820 million. The following year, Snapchat pushed out new Explore features like Snap Map to stay competitive, allowing its revenue to break the billion-dollar barrier, bringing in $1.18 billion.

The number of social media users rose by 13% during COVID-19, which helped Snap’s revenue growth. At the height of the lockdown in 2020, Snap’s third-quarter revenue was $679 million, a 52% increase from the previous year and over $100 million more than market expectations.

The strong boom gave Snap an annual income of $2.51 billion in 2020 and $4.12 billion in 2021. Since then, its revenue growth rate has slowed down due to the challenging business environment brought by the change in Apple’s privacy policy and the company’s cost-cutting focus.

In 2023, its full-year revenue was $4.61 billion, a $10 million increase from 2022.

Who Owns Snapchat?

Snapchat belongs to Snap Inc., led by Evan Spiegel, the CEO, and Bobby Murphy, the CTO. Along with Reggie Brown, they co-founded Snapchat in 2011. The app was originally called Picaboo and later renamed Snapchat. The largest institutional shareholder is FMR LLC with 14.53%, followed by Vanguard Group and SRS Investment Management LLC with 6.95% and 5.11% respectively.

Spiegel, Murphy, and Brown met when they were Stanford University students. According to several sources, Reggie Brown had the initial idea of an app that would send photos before disappearing. When he shared the idea with Evan Spiegel, Spiegel said it was a “million-dollar idea”.

Evan Spiegel then brought Bobby Murphy into the picture as a coder. The trio of Stanford University students moved in together that summer to work on the app. While Spiegel worked on the business development and Bobby Murphy on the coding, Brown had fewer tasks to do. This led to disagreements, and as a result, Reggie Brown was no longer part of Snapchat.

In 2013, Reggie Brown filed a lawsuit saying he was unfairly ousted from Snapchat. The case was closed in 2014 when Snapchat paid Brown $157.5 million. “We acknowledge Reggie’s contribution to the creation of Snapchat and appreciate his work in getting the application off the ground,” said Spiegel at the time.

Snapchat got its first institutional venture partners thanks to high school students who were regular Snapchat users, namely venture capitalist Barry Eggers’ daughter. In 2012, Eggers’ business partner Jeremy Liew heard how much his partner’s daughter liked Snapchat.

Along with Instagram and Angry Birds, Snapchat was one of the three apps every high school student used to have on their phone. Liew was interested in learning more about the company, so he tracked down Evan Spiegel’s contact details. By the end of their meeting, he invested $485,000.

The seed funding was followed by a Series A round of $13.5 million in February 2013, and a Series B of $60 million in June 2013. According to Crunchbase, Snap has raised $4.9 billion in funding over 16 rounds up to 2018.

Growth and Development of Snapchat

Snapchat rebranded as Snap Inc. in 2016, positioning itself as a technology and camera company. In addition to the Snapchat app, it also owns Bitmoji, Spectacles, Looksery, and the Zenly app.

As of 2023, Snapchat has had over 400 million daily active users, 75% of whom were 13-34 year olds. Although its user base has always been the younger demographic, it hasn’t always been this big of a company.

Here are the key milestones in the history of Snapchat, from an app to send photos that disappear to a potential leader in augmented reality.

2011-2012: Early Days of Snapchat

Evan Spiegel wrote in his first blog post on Snapchat’s website.

With most photo apps on the market advertising ways to make photos prettier or more stylized, we thought there was an opportunity to do something different

Since its early days, what set Snapchat apart was its ability to share real-life moments, no matter how funny, awkward, or embarrassing they were.

Below is an example of how Snapchat users talked about the app on Twitter in 2012:

When it was launched in 2011, Snapchat was an iOS-only app. By October 2012, users had already shared 1 billion “snaps”, making it the #19 most popular app on the App Store. Shortly after, the app became available for Android users as well.

At the end of the year, Snapchat started video snaps, allowing users to share 10-second videos that would disappear once opened.

2013: Snapchat Launches Stories, Rejects an Offer from Facebook

By 2013, Snapchat was already seeing tremendous user growth. But the app was far from perfect. Many Snapchat users said they wanted a way to send snaps to multiple people. However, the Snapchat team thought adding a “select everyone” button might make the experience less special for the users on the receiving end.

The idea behind Stories was to respond to the users’ needs without compromising the experience of sending and receiving individual snaps. When a user posts a story, everyone gets a chance to reply. Through replies, users can continue sending each other snaps, making room for more authentic conversations that start through Stories.

Jack Brody, VP of Product of Snapchat, said that the Stories feature was not an immediate hit, but it did go on to change the social media app industry. Indeed, after Snapchat, other social media platforms such as Instagram launched stories.

2013 was also the year when Snapchat rejected Facebook’s offer to buy the company for $3 billion. In the same year, Reggie Brown sued Snapchat again, claiming that Spiegel and Murphy used his original idea without compensating him. The case would end up settled in 2014.

2014: Ads and Text Messages Become a Part of the Snapchat App

In 2014, Snapchat launched geofilters that enable location tagging, and ads hosted in the Recent Updates section. The company’s first ad was for the movie Ouija.

In addition to photos and videos, the app also enabled users to send messages in text format.

2015: Snapchat Introduces New Features, Including Discover and Lenses

With the launch of Discover, Snapchat started showing content from brands and publishers such as Wall Street Journal and Vox. Next, it introduced Tap to View, a feature allowing users to view a Snap or a Story without holding the screen.

In 2015, Snapchat also launched Lenses, adding a new meaning to the word “selfie,” which was named the word of the year two years earlier by Oxford University Press. Lenses gave users the choice between fun Snapchat filters, allowing them to make their selfies more creative.

2016: Snap Inc. Rebrands

Three years after Facebook attempted to purchase Snapchat, Google offered to buy the company for $30 billion. Snapchat rejected again.

In September 2016, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy announced they would change the company’s name to Snap Inc. By 2016, Snapchat had created products like Stories, Memories, and Lenses, and started a new company called Spectacles, focusing on AR glasses.

Just a couple of months before the rebrand, Snapchat acquired Bitstrips, the company behind personalized Bitmoji avatars. Users could now integrate their Bitmojis into Snapchat’s chats and stories, making the conversations more fun and personalized.

2017: Snap Map Launches

In 2017, Snapchat added a new feature called Snap Map where friends could share their location and see what others were doing through an Actionmoji. For privacy reasons, users can also select “Ghost Mode” if they don’t want anyone to see their location on the map.

Below is the Snap Map of a user who has friends in various parts of the UK:

2018-2020: Snap Launches New Features, including Snapchat Spotlight and Creators

Between 2018 and 2020, Snapchat users gained access to the Explore feature for Snap Map, group video chats, and CitizenSnap reports. Published annually from 2020 onwards, CitizenSnap aims to increase transparency around data, diversity, and the planet.

With the substantial growth of the creator economy in 2020, in part due to the pandemic, Snapchat had to catch up. In September 2020, it announced that creators would be able to access advanced analytics to connect better with their audience. Two months later, Spotlight launched as a feed for users to discover new creators and snaps, including Trending Sounds, Lenses, and Topics.

2021-2022: Snapchat Remains an Independent Company Despite All

By September 2021, Snap’s stocks skyrocketed. Only a year later, the company was affected by Apple’s new privacy changes, with its stocks plummetting. At Code Conference 2022, Evan Spiegel responded to questions about selling the company. He said that building an independent company was the best option for Snap, as he believed the company had not reached its full potential yet.

This same year, Snapchat launched Snapchat+, its paid subscription service.

2023: AI and AR Investments Mark the Year

By 2023, Snap increased its revenue and decreased its net loss. One of its focus areas was to diversify its revenue growth, which was possible thanks to optimizing ad strategy, integrating machine learning solutions, and more.

It launched AI-powered features, such as the My AI chatbot and Dreams, a generative AI selfie creator. My AI was one of the hits of Snap’s 2023, with 200 million Snapchat users sending 20 billion messages to the AI chatbot. In addition to this, the company continued seeing results from its existing products, as the total time spent on Spotlight increased by 200% year-over-year, and over 5 million people signed up for Snapchat+.

History of the Snapchat Logo

Tech journalist Billy Gallagher wrote about the story of Snapchat’s logo in his book, How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story. According to the book, Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown wanted the logo to symbolize the app’s disappearing messages. Eventually, they decided on a smiling ghost which they named Ghostface Chillah.

As for the colors, having studied the hundred most popular apps on the App Store, Evan Spiegel realized that none of the apps had a yellow background. To make their app stand out, Spiegel placed Ghostface Chillah on a yellow background.

Snapchat still uses the ghost logo, both in yellow and in black and white. There have been small changes, such as removing the ghost’s face and making the borders bolder. The video below shows how the logo has evolved over the years.

The Future of Snapchat

As of 2023, Snapchat had five core platforms that will be important both in the short and long term:

• Snap Map
• Chat
• Camera
• Stories
• Spotlight

In its Q3 2023 report, Snapchat also announced that it will continue investing in AR and immersive experiences in the future. On average, 250 million users engage with AR on a daily basis. This includes first-time users, with 70% of them using some form of AR on their first day in the app.

AR in Snapchat is present in Lenses, Lens Studio, and AR Shopping, a feature that enables users to virtually try on clothes. In the future, Snapchat aims to be one of the industry leaders for AR.

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