Snap Inc., the company responsible for Snapchat, has prompted questions around its reliance on Google Cloud, following its $3 billion IPO filing. Reporting 158 million average daily active users, and annual revenue of $404.4 million, the company entered into an…
Snap Inc., the company responsible for Snapchat, has prompted questions around its reliance on Google Cloud, following its $3 billion IPO filing .
Reporting 158 million average daily active users, annual revenue of $404.4 million, and a stockmarket valuation reported to be in the region of $25 billion, the company this year entered into an agreement with Google to purchase at least $400 million of cloud services in each year of the five year agreement.
Snap’s prospectus specifically mentions Google Cloud as a risk, saying:
We rely on Google Cloud for the vast majority of our computing, storage, bandwidth, and other services. Any disruption of or interference with our use of the Google Cloud operation would negatively affect our operations and seriously harm our business.
Snap’s decision to use Google for infrastructure sets it apart from heavy hitters. In the article Behind Snap’s Marriage to Google and the Cloud Amir Efrati writes « Snap is thus an outlier among its peers. All of the big consumer web brands that came before it— Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Uber—built infrastructure in-house, including designing servers and other hardware to run in their data centers, and they’re quite proud of it.
