Snapchat seems to be doing very well for itself. It has experienced massive growth and is a major player in the mobile app market, despite Facebook's attempt to kill the app with Poke. The app boats 200 million "snaps" daily, meaning it's pushing quite a bit of data. For right now, the app doesn't seem to have a way to make money, so seed funding is important.
The company has confirmed that it raised $60 million in funding and saw itself garner an $800 million pre-money valuation. If you'll recall, Facebook bought Instagram for not much more than that. The company has raised a total of around $75 million since it debuted back in September 2011.
In order to continue scaling while developing the Snapchat experience, we needed to build a bigger engineering team and figure out how to pay our server bills. Long story short -- we're committed to building a big company around an innovative and fun product.