Snapchat was created by former students of which university?

Snapchat was created by former students of Stanford University. Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown developed the service while connected with Stanford, where Spiegel and Murphy studied and the original idea took shape.

The project began in 2011 under the name Picaboo, centered on sending images that disappeared after being viewed. Spiegel and Murphy built the early product, while Brown was involved in the original concept and naming discussions. The app was later renamed Snapchat as its user base expanded.

Spiegel studied product design at Stanford, and Murphy studied mathematical and computational science. Their university environment placed them in Silicon Valley’s technology ecosystem, but Snapchat’s early growth came from a deliberately simple idea: visual messages could be temporary rather than permanent records.

A common mix-up is treating Snapchat as a Stanford classroom project in the formal sense. It was a startup created by Stanford students, not a university-owned application. The company later became Snap Inc., while Snapchat evolved into a much broader platform featuring Stories, messaging, filters, and augmented-reality tools.