Tech Investors Create a Billion-Dollar-Baby Boom

What a difference a year makes.

Less than 12 months after investors valued Snapchat, the red-hot messaging app, at about $10 billion, the start-up is again in the market for money — and poised to nearly double that valuation.

A range of other popular start-ups are also poised to propel their net worths to similar multibillion-dollar heights, including the virtual scrapbooking service Pinterest and the ride-hailing app Lyft. Uber, Lyft’s top competitor, has raised more than $3 billion in the last year and now has an eye-popping valuation of $40 billion.

Giant sums of money and sky-high valuations are nothing new in the technology industry. But the latest burst of activity has put on clear display the frenzied pace of investors, who are eager to catch the next blockbuster company like Facebook. The action is also again spurring talk that overeager investors are poised to relive the dot-com boom and bust at the turn of the century, when overinflated start-ups led to a quick and painful downturn.

But not all participants in the latest mega-rounds want to cash out quickly. Some, like Henry Ellenbogen, are into these companies for the long haul.

Mr. Ellenbogen, the head of the New Horizons fund at T. Rowe Price and an investor in Twitter before it went public, put it best in his letter to investors late last year: “We prefer private companies that we would want to own more of on the I.P.O., not less.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Investors Create a Billion-Dollar-Baby Boom. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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