Venice's Snapchat To Go Public at $3.4 Billion​ Or $17 A Share

VENICE, CA - Snapchat, the photo- and video-sharing app owned by Venice-based Snap Inc., will go public Thursday, after settling on an an initial public offer of $3.4 billion and a share price of $17.

Snap Inc. will offer 200 million shares of stock to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol SNAP. The announcement settles rampant speculation about surrounding the highly anticipated IPO.

The share price is higher than many expected. Snapchat is one of the hottest tech firms to go public since Facebook despite the fact that it isn't yet profitable. However, its revenue growth was astronomical last year, jumping from $58.7 million in 2015 to $404.5 million in 2016. According to Yahoo Finance, the firm's market valuation is roughly $24 billion, "double the size of rival Twitter and the richest valuation in a U.S. tech IPO since Facebook in 2012."

Snap filed federal paperwork in February to move forward with the initial public offering. That paperwork initially estimated the value of the stock offering at $3 billion.

"Our flagship product, Snapchat, is a camera application that was created to help people communicate through short videos and images," according to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We call each of those short videos or images a Snap. On average, 158 million people use Snapchat daily, and over 2.5 billion Snaps are created every day."

The filing also touted the company's latest innovation, Spectacles, which are sunglasses that connect video directly with Snapchat. The company was co-founded by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, who created Snapchat in 2011 while attending Stanford University.

City News Service and Patch staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report. Photo: VENICE, CA - FEBRUARY 08: Murals adorn the exterior walls of a Snapchat office on February 8, 2017 in Venice, California. Snap, the parent company of popular multimedia mobile application Snapchat, has filed for its IPO that analysts believe could be the most expensive tech IPO in history. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images)