Snap

Snap Inc. is the American technology company behind Snapchat, founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown and headquartered in Santa Monica, California. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange as SNAP and reaches more than 210 million daily active users. While best known as a social platform, Snap has spent years building toward what CEO Evan Spiegel calls the "post-smartphone" era — wearable augmented reality.

Snap's AI footprint spans three areas. My AI, a chatbot built into Snapchat, brought conversational AI to a mainstream consumer audience. Generative AI Lenses apply real-time AI effects to the camera. And Specs, unveiled at AWE 2026, is Snap's first consumer augmented-reality eyewear — standalone glasses running Snap OS 2.0 on dual Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, backed by roughly three billion dollars of research and development. Specs is the clearest expression of Spiegel's long bet that glasses, not phones, are the next computing platform.

Snap has also moved to contain the cost of frontier AI. In 2026 it spun its smart-glasses work into a dedicated Specs entity, and separately carved its generative-AI video team into an independent company, Dotmo, that will build AI models for interactive gaming. Snap retains a large equity stake in Dotmo and licenses its technology to it, while CTO Bobby Murphy serves as Dotmo's lead investor. The pattern reflects a company concentrating on its camera-and-glasses core while keeping the most capital-intensive AI research at arm's length.