Since its creation in 2011, Snapchat has quickly become one of the most popular and widely-used social media platforms in the world. But who owns this billion-dollar company?
It may be easy to assume that all social media giants have one CEO, but Snapchat is not a standalone company. Snapchat is owned by a Social Media company called Snap Inc, founded in 2011 by software engineers and entrepreneurs Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown. Together they share ownership of the app.
The meteoric rise of Snapchat and the success of its founders is well documented.
Snap Inc.
Snap Inc was founded in 2011, after co-owners Spiegel, Murphy and Brown all met while studying at Stanford University. They had previously worked together on a start-up intended to help potential students with the university application process.
They soon abandoned the idea in favor of a superior concept, proposed by Reggie Brown, of an app that could send pictures and messages that would disappear after the receiver viewed them. This was where Snapchat would be born.
To workshop their new app fully, the trio formed the company Snapchat Inc, later renamed Snap Inc in 2016.
The Beginnings of Snapchat
Snapchat originally began as an app called Picaboo, in 2011. The three Snap inc. owners wanted to create an app that would allow sent messages to ‘disappear’, which was the primary purpose of the new program.
Picaboo received very little attention on its initial release, but that would soon change. The Snap Inc. founders would focus on a total rehaul of the product’s image, both through branding and technological innovation.
In September of the same year, the app name was changed from Picaboo to the now internationally recognizable Snapchat. Snap Inc. decided to focus its marketing on the technological aspects of the app rather than branding, and this refreshing approach would lead to considerable success.
Within a year of the app’s release, and after launching video capabilities and becoming available to Android users in the Google Play store, Snapchat was now seeing a massive increase in users, with more than 20 million snaps being sent per day.
