Snapchat continues its rise with fresh $60 million funding, 200M daily messages

The more ephemeral messages you send, the higher Snapchat climbs.

Snapchat officially announced today that it’s raised a fresh $60 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners and joined by General Catalyst, SV Angel, and others. The funding round brings Snapchat’s total to $75 million — not bad for company that hasn’t specified how it plans to make money.

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Calling the funding a “scaling round,” Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel tells AllThingsD that the company will use the new money to build its server infrastructure and hire new engineers.

“In order to continue scaling while developing the Snapchat experience, we needed to build a bigger engineering team and figure out how to pay our server bills,” Shapchat said in a post on its blog.

Snapchat also announced today that its users are sharing 200 million messages each day — a big jump over the 150 millon record it announced in April. (The company has yet to disclose user numbers.)

Snapchat also announced that Michael Lynton, the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, is joining the Snapchat board.

So Snapchat has the funding, the user activity, and the high-profile board members — but what about its monetization strategy? Talking to AllThingsD, Spiegel said that he’s fond of both in-app transactions and native advertising, so expect Snapchat’s eventual business to focus on at least one of those things.

Or maybe it will bite the bullet and sell itself to Facebook.