Evan Spiegel

Evan Spiegel

Evan Thomas Spiegel (born June 4, 1990) is an American businessman who co-founded Snap Inc and has been its chief executive officer since the company began as Snapchat in 2011. He directs Snap's augmented reality strategy, which includes the Snap Spectacles line of AR glasses, the Snap OS operating system, the Lens Studio creation tool, and the Lenses that run inside Snapchat. Spiegel personally unveiled Snap's first standalone AR display glasses in 2021 and the developer-focused fifth-generation Spectacles in 2024, and he has framed see-through glasses as the computing platform that he expects to follow the smartphone.

Early life and education

Spiegel was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of lawyers John W. Spiegel and Melissa Ann Thomas. He attended the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica and took design classes during high school. He then enrolled at Stanford University to study product design, where he met Bobby Murphy in 2009. Spiegel left Stanford in 2012 to work on the company full time, completed his remaining credits years later, and received his degree in 2018.

Snap Inc

In the spring of 2011, Stanford student Reggie Brown suggested an app for sending photos that disappear. Spiegel took up the idea and recruited Murphy, who had already graduated, to build it. The three released an early version called Picaboo in July 2011, later renamed Snapchat, with Spiegel as CEO and designer, Murphy as chief technology officer, and Brown handling marketing. The app reached roughly one million daily active users by the end of 2012.

The parent company, Snap Inc, is based in Santa Monica, California. It went public on March 2, 2017, trading under the symbol SNAP on the New York Stock Exchange, in one of the larger technology initial public offerings of that period. Spiegel remains CEO and Murphy remains CTO. Spiegel was the world's youngest billionaire in 2015 on the strength of his Snap stake; Forbes ranked him 55th on its 2021 list of wealthiest Americans, and reported his net worth at 2.5 billion dollars in August 2025 after Snap's share price declined.

Augmented reality strategy at Snap

Spiegel has positioned Snap around its camera and around augmented reality rather than treating AR as a feature of a messaging app. The company's core AR product is the Lens, a real-time effect that overlays graphics on the camera view. Lenses are built in Lens Studio, a free desktop application that packages Snap's computer vision and graphics technology into templates for creators. Snap reported that more than 75 percent of Snapchat users engage with augmented reality every day, that Lenses were used in the Snapchat camera about 9 billion times per day on average, and that the catalog reached 4 million Lenses created by roughly 375,000 publishing creators. Brand advertisers use Lenses for face filters and product try-on, which Snap counts as part of its advertising business rather than reporting AR revenue separately.

Spectacles hardware

Under Spiegel, Snap has shipped several generations of camera and AR glasses branded Spectacles. The first three generations were consumer camera glasses without a display; the fourth and fifth added AR optics and were restricted to developers and creators.

Generation	Announced	Notes
Spectacles (1st gen)	September 24, 2016	Sunglasses with a camera that recorded clips into Snapchat; sold through Snapbot vending machines from November 2016. No display.
Spectacles 2	April 2018	Added water resistance, more storage, and software updates.
Spectacles 3	November 2019	Dual cameras for depth capture; priced at 380 dollars.
Spectacles (4th gen)	May 20, 2021	Snap's first AR display glasses; offered to selected AR creators by application through Lens Studio, with shipments late in 2021.
Spectacles (5th gen, "Spectacles '24")	September 17, 2024	Standalone AR glasses running Snap OS; developer-only.

Spiegel unveiled the fifth-generation Spectacles at the Snap Partner Summit on September 17, 2024. The glasses weigh 226 grams, use four cameras to drive Snap's spatial engine and to track the wearer's hands, and project a 46-degree diagonal field of view through Liquid Crystal on Silicon micro-projectors and waveguides. They run on two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and report about 13 milliseconds of motion-to-photon latency. The wearer navigates with hand gestures and voice, and the main menu sits in the palm of the hand. Snap offered the hardware only to developers in the United States through a subscription of 99 dollars per month with a one-year commitment, alongside a rebuilt Lens Studio 5 that supports TypeScript and JavaScript.

Consumer Specs and current direction

At Augmented World Expo on June 10, 2025, Spiegel announced that Snap would release a consumer version of its AR glasses, called Specs, in 2026. He described the device as having "a much smaller form factor, at a fraction of the weight, with a ton more capability" than the 2024 developer model. Spiegel has tied the effort to a broader argument that see-through glasses can support shared in-person activity in ways a phone screen cannot: "The promise of see-through glasses is like, you and I can sit across from each other, play a game of chess, design something, build something, watch something together. That's totally unlike any computing experience that exists today." In the same announcement Snap said it was adding AI services from OpenAI and Google's Gemini to Snap OS for multimodal Lenses, along with Niantic Spatial visual positioning, new spatial and speech APIs, and WebXR browser support, while keeping the existing Lens library compatible.

By 2026 Spiegel had reorganized the program around the planned consumer launch. Snap spun Specs into a standalone subsidiary early in 2026 and announced a partnership with Qualcomm to power the glasses with Snapdragon XR platforms, focused on on-device AI, graphics, and multiuser experiences. Spiegel said the Qualcomm work "provides a strong foundation for the future of Specs, bringing developers and consumers advanced technology and performance that pushes the boundaries of what's possible." As of April 2026, Snap was still targeting a consumer release later in 2026.

Personal life

Spiegel married the Australian model Miranda Kerr on May 27, 2017. He obtained French citizenship in 2018. In 2017 he and Kerr established the Spiegel Family Fund for philanthropy in California and elsewhere.