Snap’s offering will be one of the biggest and highest-profile market debuts of recent years, raising billions
of dollars, giving lift to a moribund market in new stocks and minting paper wealth for its top investors.
Perhaps more important, it will cement Snap’s status as one of the newest members of a rarefied club of late: those unicorns,
or start-ups valued at more than $1 billion by private investors, that have successfully jumped to the public markets.
Instead of focusing on the core product of disappearing messages, Snapchat instead represents a new way of
consuming content, largely produced by its users — laid alongside a fast-growing advertising business.
On Wednesday, shares of Snap Inc. were priced at $17 — higher than the expected price range of $14 to $16 — indicating strong demand among investors.
In the prospectus for its stock sale, the service declared itself a “camera company.” So far
that has included selling Spectacles, camera-equipped sunglasses that let users upload 10-second videos directly to Snapchat that briefly captured the fancy of the tech cognoscenti.
Revenue totaled about $404 million in 2016, up from zero in sales three years ago,
and the company said it believed it could reach $1 billion this year.
Based in the fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice, the company has since introduced ways for users to broadcast “stories” about their days to wider audiences,
and pioneered the use of computer-generated lenses that transform those users into dogs or tacos.
