Snapchat lost a insane amount of money previous year

The company’s internal financials were obtained by Gawker this week, and it would seem that the popular photo messaging app lost $128 million between January and November in 2014, while only pulling in $3 million in revenue.

Cash on hand at the end of the period sat at $320 million meaning Snapchat certainly had plenty of room to burn money, and that was before they raised $486.5 million Series D in December 2014, followed by $200 million Series E in March this year, followed by a $650 million Series F round in May. Many growing tech startups are in the red, and some even go public before they’re profitable.

The picture is surely different now: Snapchat introduced advertising in only October of past year, so the documents reflect just a month and a half of the company’s first stab at generating revenue. Also, Snapchat’s “Discover” feature, in which the company partners with advertisers to deliver branded content, first launched in January 2015, so any revenue generated from those advertisers is not listed in the report. The company is spending hardly anything on marketing – about $600,000. Pinterest has been particularly slow on the uptake, and its head of partnerships, Joanne Bradford, just left.

The leaked financials also showed the company spent about $13.7 million on “outside services”, which is almost equivalent to the amount it spent on labor costs during the period.

That said, Snapchat is now over four years old and in that time it has done little to nothing to seriously attempt to monetize itself, and while it may have somewhere in the vicinity of $500 million to $1 billion in cash reserves to spend it needs to get far more serious in trying to increase its incoming revenue, something it clearly hasn’t been doing. It has had a lot of turnover on its business side, losing key executives like former Instagram chief Emily White as its COO.

Getty/Scott OlsonEvan Spiegel, CEO and cofounder of Snapchat.Snapchat’s financials for 2014 are out, and they’re pretty much as expected.

Snapchat has not yet returned a request for comment.

If Discover proves to be a bust, it’s hard to imagine Snapchat’s bottom line improving much.