Messaging app provider Snapchat, Inc. may be one of the hottest startups with a unicorn valuation in 2015, but a leak of its 2014 financials show that it’s burning venture capital like there’s no tomorrow.

According to documents obtained by Gawker, in the period January to November of 2014 Snapchat lost $128 million while bringing in the measly amount of $3 million in revenue.

The largest expenses excluding payroll were $47 million spent on further developing the product and $13 million for a line item described “outside services”, with no explanation as to what those services entail.

Marketing the app was strangely not even remotely on the agenda for the company, with the total marketing spend coming in at the incredibly small amount (compared to other items) of only $607,000.

Cash on hand at the end of the period sat at $320 million meaning Snapchat certainly had plenty of room to burn money, and that was before they raised $486.5 million Series D in December 2014, followed by $200 million Series E in March this year, followed by a $650 million Series F round in May.

To be somewhat fair to Snapchat, the company only started selling advertising in October, so the $3 million figure only covers a short period, but as Gawker correctly notes “even if we round generously in Snapchat’s favor and call it $3 million per month in ad income, that that wouldn’t come close to overcoming Snapchat’s costs.”

The period also doesn’t cover the roll out of Snapchat’s curated content feature Discover, which we panned when it launched, and has not been performing particularly well for the company given it was forced to put the feature front and center on the app given many users simply weren’t using it.

From July:

Numbers reported for the Discover service have, by accounts, been lackluster, with one publisher telling the [Wall Street Journal] that the feature hadn’t lived up to the expectations of partners around traffic and ad revenue; although a specific number wasn’t shared, it was said that it wouldn’t become financially meaningful until it starts attracting more than two million unique visitors a day, “which is well above the partner’s current traffic numbers on Snapchat.”

Discover would be bringing in increased advertising revenue to Snapchat, but it’s questionable whether it would come close to covering its ever increasing costs.

Burn baby, burn

It’s far too early to write Snapchat off yet, and it is true that startups do burn through cash in their early years as they seek to establish themselves in the market.

That said, Snapchat is now over four years old and in that time it has done little to nothing to seriously attempt to monetize itself, and while it may have somewhere in the vicinity of $500 million to $1 billion in cash reserves to spend it needs to get far more serious in trying to increase its incoming revenue, something it clearly hasn’t been doing.

There will be one company though who may be grinning at the news, and that’s Facebook, Inc. who offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013 and was turned away; on paper Snapchat may currently have a valuation of $16 billion or possibly even more, but that number means nothing if Snapchat continues to burn money the way it has without any solid future sources of increased revenue coming through the door.

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