Snapchat is getting bigger. The company announced that it was acquiring Looksery, a two-year-old facial recognition startup, according to Business Insider.
The deal is said to have cost Snapchat $150 million.
Looksery is a kind of face modification app that uses special filters to change how your face looks, according to Tech Crunch. It can make you look like a zombie, a panda, and even Iron Man.
Four years after the photo-messaging app was originally created, Snapchat is now worth $16 billion, according to the Verge. It consists of over 500 employees and clocks in over 100 million users daily.
Along with the new acquisition, Snapchat has announced its first paid feature on the app. This is the ability to replay snaps. If someone wants to replay a snap, they can pay 99 cents and get three replays. But individual snaps can only be replayed once, according to the Verge.
Snapchat released the facial recognition program on its app on Tuesday under the name Lenses, according to Tech Crunch. The new update is rapidly becoming a popular hit, much like Snapchat Stories was when it was first introduced.
With all the recent updates and acquisitions, it's becoming very clear that the phenomenon that is Snapchat is not disappearing any time soon.
