Snapchat said to raise $200M for $20B valuation

LOS ANGELES — Snapchat, the wildly popular messaging app, is raising another round of financing. The $200 million infusion now values the company at $20 billion, according to a report from TechCrunch.

Just three years ago, Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $4 billion, and CEO Evan Spiegel was widely criticized for not taking the deal.

In a commencement speech at the University of Southern California last year, Spiegel said he made the right choice. “If you sell, you will know that it wasn't the right dream anyway," he said. "If you don't sell, you are probably onto … the beginning of something meaningful.”

Snapchat, the most successful tech start-up in the L.A. area, is based in trendy Venice Beach. It began as a way for students to send photos and texts that could disappear within 10 seconds. It's since evolved into a popular way for young folks to make and watch videos. Snapchat says some 100 million videos are viewed daily on the service.

To date, Snapchat has raised more than $1.3 billion in financing, from Fidelity Investments, Alibaba, Lightspeed, Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others.

Snapchat had no comment.

It is now among the most valuable of the 161 unicorns, start-ups worth more than $1 billion.

But that number is in jeopardy, as more funding rounds like the one with Foursquare lower the market valuations of some private companies, said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Snapchat's big round of financing is also a rarity of late. The number of mega-deals of at least $100 million — 38 in the fourth quarter of 2015 — was roughly half the 72 in the previous quarter, according to the KPMG International & CB Insights 2015 Venture Pulse Report. Mega-rounds in the last three months of 2015 raised $11.4 billion — down 44% from Q3 2015 — the lowest level recorded since the first three months of 2013.