Yahoo has reportedly closed its investment in Snapchat

The company has been rumored to have been raising a new round at a $10B valuation for months

I've been hearing the rumors of Snapchat raising a new round of funding at a $10 billion valuation for, literally, months now. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was supposed to have invested $20 million, with DST Global also participating.

The latest rumor was that Yahoo would use some of the $7 billion windfall it made in the Alibaba IPO to invest in the company as well.

Now it looks as though that invested is done, with Yahoo having closed its portion of the round, according to a report out from Bloomberg on Wednesday.

The exact amount invested has not been revealed, though it said to be in the millions, but the deal did, in fact, value the company at $10 billion. The round is also said to still be open, and that KPCB could still wind up being part of the investment, as could Alibaba.

VatorNews has reached out to both Snapchat and Yahoo for confirmation of the report, but neither company could we reached for comment at this time. We will update this story if we learn more. 

Snapchat has already raised $163 million, most recently a $50 million round in December of last year, which puts its valuation at $2 billion. Investors in the company include Tencent, SV Angel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark, General Catalyst Partners, Institutional Venture Partners and Coatue Management.

Recent Snapchat developments 

Snapchat has been in the news a lot lately, for both good and bad reasons.

The bad has included leaked e-mails from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel from his time in college, in which he refered to women as "bitches" and "sluts." A sample e-mail read, "LUAU FUCKING RAGED. Thanks to all of you. Hope at least six girl [sic] sucked your dicks last night. Cuz that didn’t happen for me.” Signed affectionately, “fuckbitchesgetleid. Spiegel.”

Then there was the public battle between Spiegel, CTO Robert Murphy and their former frat brother Reggie Brown, who sued the company claiming that he had actually come up with the idea for Snapchat. It was finally settled earlier this month, but no terms were disclosed. 

Finally, there was the Snappening, in which third-party Snapchat apps were hacked, leading to some 200,000 images and videos of naked users being leaked across the Internet. Individually each of those incidents would have been bad enough, but they all happened within just a few months of each other.

It got so bad, in fact, that the company had to hire a high level public relations chief just to handle all the bad press.

But there has been some good news as well: Snapchat recently unveiled advertisements for the first time, proving that there is a way to monetize and potentially justifying the huge valuation that it is going to have when this round finally closes.

(Image source: appsngizmo.com)