23-year-old CEO Evan Spiegel co-founded Snapchat in a Stanford fraternity house. (Creative Commons)

The company was also offered an investment by Tencent Holdings, a Chinese media conglomerate that already has stakes in QQ, WeChat and Kakao, instant-messaging services popular in Asia, that would value the two-year-old company at $4 billion. 

Facebook had previously offered to buy Snapchat for $1 billion, in what was widely seen as an attempt to regain teenage users, according to Slate. It is a business-savvy move for Facebook, which has grown so large in audience that young people now avoid posting personal information for fear of prospective employers and college admissions officers seeing. Snapchat, which allows photographs, videos and text captions to be sent for up to 10 seconds at a time before self-destructing, is especially popular among teenagers and young adults.  

According to the Wall Street Journal, 23-year-old co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel will likely not be entertaining any acquisition or investment offers until early next year, people briefed on the matter said, as he hopes usage of the app will have grown enough to generate an even higher valuation.

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