Kleiner Perkins investing up to $20M in Snapchat's next round at nearly $10B valuation; DST Global invested earlier this year at $7B valuation
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Agrees to Invest in Snapchat — Ephemeral Messaging Service Gets a Venture-Capital Shot in the Arm
Context & Ripple Effects
Snapchat's valuation ladder has been steep: IVP put in $80M at an $800M valuation in June 2013, DST Global came in earlier this year at $7B, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers now agrees to invest up to $20M at nearly $10B — roughly a twelve-fold markup in fourteen months. The company has been building toward this round deliberately: it hired Facebook's Mike Randall as VP of Monetization in June, launched geofilters as a potential revenue stream in July, and reported Stories views hitting 1 billion per day.
The syndication footprint — WSJ, BBC, CNBC, TechCrunch, Re/code and VentureBeat all carrying it on or about August 26 — reflects how closely the market is watching whether a pre-revenue messaging app can sustain a ten-figure price. A July report of talks with investors including Alibaba at a $10 billion valuation remains unconfirmed, but the Kleiner deal lands right at that number.
First-order effects
- Kleiner Perkins secures a position in one of consumer tech's fastest-growing apps just as Snapchat scales monetization infrastructure under its new VP of Monetization, with the round validating the near-$10B mark DST's $7B entry pointed toward.
- Snapchat gains a top-tier Silicon Valley franchise investor on top of DST Global, strengthening its hand in any continued financing conversations.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms competing for the same teen and young-adult engagement now face a competitor armed with fresh capital and an explicit monetization mandate via geofilters and live-event Stories.
- If the rumored Alibaba participation materializes, strategic Asian capital entering a US consumer messaging round would pressure other late-stage investors to pay up for scarce positions in breakout social apps.
Third-order effects
- The $800M-to-$10B jump inside two years, with no disclosed revenue base, hardens the pattern of late-stage funds bidding valuations far ahead of fundamentals for category-leading consumer apps — a structure that leaves little margin for growth stumbles.
- Blue-chip venture firms like Kleiner Perkins crowding into rounds once dominated by crossover and sovereign-linked money such as DST blurs the line between early-stage venture and private-market momentum investing.
The trend: Late-stage private capital is repricing leading consumer messaging apps at accelerating multiples well ahead of demonstrated revenue, with each round resetting the floor for the next.