• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 24, 2013

Snapchat on Monday announced raising a whopping $60 million in a second round of venture financing led by IVP and including General Catalyst, Benchmark Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and SV Angel. The financing for the startup behind the wildly popular photo-messaging app follows a $13.5 million initial funding in February.

With the new investment, Snapchat has a valuation of $800 million, according to reports.

The company said in a blog post today that users are now sending up to 200 million “snaps” per day. Unlike other photo apps, Snapchat images are only meant to last for up to 10 seconds, after which they’re deleted from the company’s servers. In May, however, Forbes and other outlets reported supposedly deleted photos could be recovered with a degree of technical know-how.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) subsequently filed a complaint against Snapchat with the Federal Trade Commission on the grounds it deceived customers by leading them to believe photos are destroyed in a matter of seconds after viewing. The controversy so far, though, doesn’t appear to have had much impact on Snapchat’s growth so far.

With the new funding, the company said it plans to expand its engineering team and “figure out how pay our server bills.” Underscoring Snapchats’s rapid rise, Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman and CEO Michael Lynton is joining its board.