Snap Inc.

Liquid AI

Snap Inc.

Snap's revenue comes almost entirely from advertising. Brands pay to run ads between Stories, in the Discover section, and through sponsored AR Lenses and Filters.

The ad business is powered by the time users spend on the platform — over 40 minutes per day for the average user under 25.

Snapchat+ is a subscription product launched in 2022 at $3.99/month, offering exclusive features like custom app icons, Story rewatch indicators, and priority support. It hit 12 million subscribers by 2024 — meaningful but still a small fraction of total revenue.

Snap also sells hardware — Spectacles (AR glasses) — but this has been more of an R&D investment than a revenue driver. Hardware revenue is negligible.

The long-term bet is that AR glasses become the next computing platform, and Snap wants to be the one building the operating system for your face.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Snap Inc.

The origin story of Snapchat involves a Stanford fraternity, a disputed idea, and a lawsuit. In April 2011, Reggie Brown pitched the concept of disappearing photos to Evan Spiegel in their Kappa Sigma fraternity house.

Spiegel loved it and brought in Bobby Murphy, a math and computer science major, to build it. The app launched as "Picaboo" in July 2011.

The initial reception was rough — barely anyone downloaded it. Spiegel's mother was one of the first users.

They rebranded to "Snapchat" in September 2011 and slowly gained traction among high school and college students who wanted to share photos without them living on the internet forever. The disappearing message format felt risky, intimate, and fun — the opposite of Facebook's permanent timeline.

Then came the co-founder drama. Reggie Brown claims he originated the core concept.

Spiegel and Murphy dispute this. Brown was pushed out of the company in 2012.

He filed a lawsuit in 2013 claiming intellectual property rights and breach of contract. The case settled in 2014 for $157.5 million — making Brown perhaps the most expensive person ever kicked out of a fraternity project.

Spiegel and Murphy continued building.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Snap Inc.

Snapchat grew through word of mouth among teenagers and college students. The app spread through high schools like wildfire — kids told each other about it specifically because their parents weren't on it.

The anti-Facebook positioning was powerful: Snapchat was where you could be real, messy, and unfiltered because nothing was permanent.

International expansion drove the next wave. Snapchat invested heavily in localized content, Discover partnerships with local publishers, and market-specific features.

India became one of the fastest-growing markets after they launched Snapchat in Hindi and other local languages.

Augmented reality became the moat. Snap invested billions in AR technology, making the camera the centerpiece of the app.

AR Lenses went from silly face filters to genuinely useful tools — trying on sunglasses, previewing furniture in your room, translating signs in real time. By making the camera "smart," Snap differentiated from text-based social networks and positioned itself for the AR glasses future.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Snap Inc.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is the permanent existential threat. When Spiegel turned down Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer in 2013, Zuckerberg responded by copying every single Snapchat feature — Stories on Instagram, disappearing messages on Messenger, AR filters on Facebook.

Instagram Stories alone now has over 500 million daily users, dwarfing Snapchat. Every feature Snap invents, Meta copies within months and deploys to a user base 5x larger.

TikTok redefined short-form content and stole attention from every other social platform. Snapchat launched Spotlight to compete, but TikTok's algorithmic feed and creator ecosystem are years ahead.

Young users who once spent hours on Snapchat now split that time with TikTok.

Monetization lags behind competitors. Snap's average revenue per user is significantly lower than Meta's or TikTok's.

Advertisers often treat Snapchat as an afterthought — they build campaigns for Instagram and TikTok first, then maybe run them on Snap. The company has been unprofitable for most of its public life, with only recent quarters showing operational improvement.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Snap Inc.

Snapchat — the core messaging and social media app with 850+ million monthly active users, known for disappearing messages, Stories, and the Snap Map. Snap Lenses & Filters — augmented reality effects that overlay digital content on the real world through the camera.

Over 3.5 billion Lenses have been created by the community. Stories — Snapchat invented the Stories format in 2013 (24-hour disappearing photo/video collections).

Every major social platform copied it. Snap Map — a real-time map showing friends' locations and local events.

Used by hundreds of millions and particularly popular with Gen Z. Spotlight — Snap's TikTok competitor: a feed of short-form vertical videos from the community, with creators earning a share of revenue.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Snap Inc.

Benchmark led the Series A — one of the most legendary early-stage investments in tech history. Lightspeed Venture Partners invested early.

Tencent bought a 12% stake, giving Snap a strategic investor from the world's largest gaming company. Alibaba, General Atlantic, and Fidelity participated in later rounds.

The March 2017 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $24 billion valuation — Spiegel was 26 years old.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.