If you’ve been baffled by the meteoric rise of Snapchat, a mobile app that allows users to send texts or share photos and videos with friends for a limited window of time, you probably aren’t alone. For many, the mobile app, which launched less than two years ago, is a superfluous replacement for the bread-and-butter text applications that come bundled with every modern smartphone. But for a lot of younger users, the app, which allows them to send messages freely without worrying about a record of those messages turning up later, has been a sensation. And according to a recent report from CNET, Snapchat has collected enough funds to keep that sensation going for a long time.

Snapchat is reportedly in the process of wrapping up a major financing circuit, and will soon have notched nearly $100 million in company funds and $500 million in corporate valuation.

If those numbers seem remarkably high, it’s because they are: just recently, the company, based in Los Angeles and founded by four Stanford University students, was in the headlines for securing a $13.5 million funding deal with Benchmark Capital. But that deal also analyzed the company’s public clout and corporate assets, and supposedly placed its overall value between $60 and $70 million.

Now, Snapchat’s collective of partners and financial backers has grown exponentially. Who the big-spending partners are, and perhaps more importantly, what Snapchat intends to do with their new financial position, remains to be publicized. But with Snapchat’s expanding network (in April, Evan Spiegel, the company’s CEO and co-founder, noted that Snapchat users were uploading more than 150 million images each day, and that number has likely grown), it’s certainly conceivable that the company could make a grab for a larger social media presence.

However, how far Snapchat could extend beyond the mobile universe–and how much it could compete with more universal social media models like Facebook and Twitter–is questionable. Right now, the mobile Snapchat app has achieved niche popularity with teens and youngsters who like to joke around via text, and then watch their (potentially inappropriate) messages and photographs evaporate into thin air. That feverish cellphone appeal is in no danger of abating any time soon, either: just days ago, the iOS Snapchat application got a major update.

But considering Snapchat’s relatively bare-bones and gimmicky concept, one wonders what the company will do with that fresh $100 million, and whether the application could survive in the less private, more permanent internet world.