The raw ambitions of red-hot messaging startup Snapchat are out of the bag, thanks to the Sony Pictures hack.
Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is a Snapchat board member, so when the hack exposed his email inbox, it provided a decent-sized window into the recent history of the company. Having turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook, Snapchat is looking beyond basic messaging, eyeing everything from shopping to wearables computers. Together with companies such as WhatsApp, which did agree to a Facebook acquisition, the startup is part of a widespread effort to extend the quick simplicity of messaging into countless new markets.
As reported by Techcrunch and Business Insider, Snapchat has secretly purchased a number of startups, including a QR code scanning and iBeacon outfit called Scan.me, whose technologies could be used to identify, purchase, and promote physical products, and a wearable company called Vergence Labs, whose technology is reminiscent of Google's Glass smart eyewear. Meanwhile, Valleywag confirmed that Snapchat turned down more than $3 billion of Facebook’s money when the social network behemoth tried to acquire the messaging app last year.
According to these reports, Snapchat spent ample sums for the startups it acquired: $14 million in cash, $3 million in restricted stock units, and $33 million in Class B common Snapchat stock for Scan.me; $11 million in cash and $4 million in stock for Vergence Labs; and $10 million in cash and $20 million in stock and bonuses for AddLive, the startup it acquired in June to run its real-time video chat tool. Of all these acquisitions, only AddLive was made public, though the terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In addition to its real-time video chat tool, Snapchat may have plans for a more robust music component. The app has featured artists through its promoted videos in the past, and it lets users click through to visit the iTunes store to buy the music in the background of those videos. But according to reports, CEO Evan Spiegel wanted to start a record label for artists as well, and to promote those artists through Snapchat.
Snapchat may also have a fledgling partnership with Twitter in the works, Techcrunch reports. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo met with Spiegel in January 2014 to discuss working with Snapchat, and apparently, Twitter lent Snapchat some engineering help for “scaling the platform.”
Snapchat is enormously popular—and well funded. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company has around 100 million monthly users and a valuation of a $10 billion dollars. But clearly, it wants more.
Just last month, the company announced Snapcash, a service in which the company partnered with Square to let users instantly beam money to others on the platform, getting the jump on other social networks that may have plans to merge messaging and payments in the near future—notably Facebook. It seems that’s only the first of many other tools the company may roll out in the next few months.
