IT'S OFFICIAL: Snap just filed for its IPO

Now that its financial statements have been made publicly available, the must wait 15 days before holding formal meetings, or the IPO "roadshow," with investors. Snap is planning to list shares in March, and could fetch a valuation of as much as $25 billion, people familiar with the matter have said. The company's 26-year-old CEO, Evan Spiegel, will be the focus of the message that management conveys to investors in those meetings, people familiar with Snap's roadshow planning have said. He will be framed as a visionary, similar to how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was depicted before that company's flotation.Spiegel owns 21.8% of the company, the filing shows, making him the largest shareholder along with co-founder Robert Murphy who owns the same amount.

That Snap would go public has been a foregone conclusion on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley for months. The company last year added a seasoned IPO specialist to its board and then changed its name from Snapchat to Snap in a move that it said was meant to speak to potential public investors.

"You can search Snapchat or Spectacles for the fun stuff and leave Snap Inc. for the Wall Street crowd :)" the company said in a blog post in September.

Snap's business is quickly evolving from the chat app that gave it its name. It has increased advertising and added news, and last year it began selling its Spectacles, eyeglasses that can take photos and record video.

Still, as Snap begins to meet with investors, it will need to explain what its total addressable market can be — outside of the millennial demographic it's already popular with. It will also have to lay out a vision for how revenue can grow from less than $1 billion to many billions. The company did report meteoric growth. Annual revenue of $404 million is up from just $58.6 million in 2015, the filings show.And the angle Snap chooses in pitching itself to Wall Street will be important. The company's recent foray into hardware and its new identity as a "camera company" could cause investors to value it differently than a pure-play internet company, where profit margins are typically higher.

More to come...

Alex Heath contributed reporting.