• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 29, 2015

Snapchat just raised an additional $537 million, according to a regulatory filing released on Friday.

The investment aligns with recent comments from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, in which he shot down the possibility of a sale. Rather, as Spiegel told attendees at Re/code’s Code Conference on Tuesday, he is eying an IPO.

The additional funding -- which values Snapchat at $16 billion, according to CNBC -- adds to the roughly $800 million it has already taken from Alibaba, Fidelity, York Capital and Glade Brook Capital, among other investors.

Having officially shed its fad status, Snapchat is redefining the way young consumers communicate, and posting some serious usership figures.

Snapchat has 100 million users who watch an astonishing 2 billion videos per day, according to internal figures. That’s half the volume of videos viewed on Facebook, although the latter is far larger in size.

In addition, Snapchat now claims that 60% of smartphone users ages 13 to 34 are active on the service.

Snapchat’s business strategy remains high experimental. Indeed, the vanishing-message service only recently introduced ads to its platform, which also disappear after users view them or within 24 hours. Still, investors appear confidant that the social darling can turn its strong video viewership into dollars.

As part of its Discover service, Snapchat is preparing to sell 10-second ads for 2 cents per view, the company recently announced. The “Two Pennies” announcement was made during the Daily Mail and Elite Daily Digital Content NewFronts presentation, earlier this month.

“Snapchat ads are the most exciting ad product since YouTube TrueView,” Jon Steinberg, CEO of Daily Mail North America, tweeted on the heels of the presentation. “At $.02 [per view] a no brainer for any brand interested in 18-24s,” the former BuzzFeed president said.

The announced pricing was considerably less than previous estimates. Sources recently told Re/code that Snapchat was charging advertisers around $100 for every thousand views on Discover. At one point, Snapchat was also reportedly pressuring brands with a non-negotiable asking price of $750,000 for a day of disappearing ads?

Launched at the beginning of the year, Discover gives media partners their own channel on which they can feature content produced specifically for Snapchat’s young audience.

Publishing partners include National Geographic, Vice, Yahoo News, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, CNN, The Food Network and ESPN.

A Snapchat spokesperson did not return requests for additional comment by press time.