Snap’s offering will be one of the biggest and highest-profile market debuts of recent years, raising billions<br />of dollars, giving lift to a moribund market in new stocks and minting paper wealth for its top investors.<br />Perhaps more important, it will cement Snap’s status as one of the newest members of a rarefied club of late: those unicorns,<br />or start-ups valued at more than $1 billion by private investors, that have successfully jumped to the public markets.<br />Instead of focusing on the core product of disappearing messages, Snapchat instead represents a new way of<br />consuming content, largely produced by its users — laid alongside a fast-growing advertising business.<br />On Wednesday, shares of Snap Inc. were priced at $17 — higher than the expected price range of $14 to $16 — indicating strong demand among investors.<br />In the prospectus for its stock sale, the service declared itself a “camera company.” So far<br />that has included selling Spectacles, camera-equipped sunglasses that let users upload 10-second videos directly to Snapchat that briefly captured the fancy of the tech cognoscenti.<br />Revenue totaled about $404 million in 2016, up from zero in sales three years ago,<br />and the company said it believed it could reach $1 billion this year.<br />Based in the fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice, the company has since introduced ways for users to broadcast “stories” about their days to wider audiences,<br />and pioneered the use of computer-generated lenses that transform those users into dogs or tacos.
