Snap investment benefits St. Francis High School
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (KTVU) - The company behind Snapchat is trading sharply higher in its Wall Street debut. Shares of Snap Inc. jumped $8.21, or 48 percent, to $25.21 a share in afternoon trading on Thursday - and one Bay Area school will benefit.
Mountain View's St. Francis High School will cash in on its investment in Snap. The private Catholic school took part in an early investment round in Snap. According to reports, the school's stake is expected to be worth 50 million dollars.
According to St. Francis High School, in early 2012 a dad of two students at the school, Barry Eggers, was intrigued when his kids came home from school enthralled by a new social media app called Snapchat. Eggers who is a founding partner at the venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners learned about the popularity of the app. His kids were just 12 and 14 at the time. Eggers researched the company and one of his partners tracked down the founder of Snapchat, who was running the business out of his Stanford dorm room at the time.
According to the school, Eggers wanted to invest in the company and invited the school to join him through the SF Growth Fund. The SF Growth Fund donated $15,000 while Lightspeed invested $485,000.
"While the full impact has yet to be realized, the return on this investment will allow us to accelerate the goals of our strategic plan, which emphasizes our commitment to make Catholic education more affordable and accessible to our community, recruit and retain outstanding faculty and staff, and develop innovative programs and facilities. This incredible boon will not, by itself, completely fund the goals of the strategic plan, but it will help lay the necessary foundation and give us a remarkable head start. As always, we rely on our community's continued support in order to fulfill the full breadth and depth of our vision," said Saint Francis President Simon Chiu.
More details on the investment will be revealed in the coming weeks, according to the school.