April 26, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] Global venture capital firms Sequoia and SoftBank said on Jan. 23 they are investing US$500 million in Snow, the Snapchat clone app owned by Korean internet giant Naver.

With the latest funding, the two firms will acquire a combined 20 percent stake in Snow China, the Chinese operations that make up almost 50 percent of the app’s total 200 million downloads globally. They didn’t reveal each portion of their stake purchase.

Snow, which has recently pivoted away from its existing user-to-user communication app to turn into a dedicated selfie camera app, plans to use the new investments to strengthen its augmented reality and facial recognition technologies to upgrade its camera features.

Snow started as a team project at Naver in September 2015, mimicking the success story of Snapchat. The app gained huge popularity in Asia with its localized camera filters, stickers and other features, while Snapchat made little effort to appeal to Asian users.

In a push for global expansion, the team was spun off in July 2016. Now Snow operates three operations -- in Korea, China and Japan. Currently, Naver, Line Plus and Line own 55 percent, 28 percent and 17 percent stake in the firm, respectively. Line Plus is a firm set up for Line’s global business.

Back in 2016, there were some news reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had attempted to purchase Snow but Naver co-founder Lee Hae-jin turned down the offer.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)