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Facebook seems to have realized that if Venice-based Snapchat can’t be beat (and they tried to with the recent Facebook Poke app), then Snapchat should be bought.
But Snapchat turned down Facebook for a $3 billion acquisition offer, which is triple the amount Facebook reportedly offered Snapchat even earlier in the year, The Wall Street Journal reported today.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said that he will not consider an acquisition or investment at least until early 2014. He is awaiting a larger valuation, which could likely be propelled along by a $200 million investment from Tencent, the company that operates China’s ubiquitous WeChat messaging app.
In June, Snapchat raised $60 million from Institutional Venture Partners, Lightspeed and Benchmark at the same time that it announced that Snapchat users were sending 200 million messages a day. Now, with that number skyrocketing to 350 million a day, it’s likely that some more big funding news will be coming from Snapchat in early 2014 - but just without Facebook in the picture.
