Snapchat is World's Third Biggest Startup: Your Headlines for Thursday

Alibaba is finalizing a $200 million investment into Snapchat, which would value the ephemeral messaging – and recently content discovery – app at $15 billion, according to Bloomberg. That places Snapchat onto the third march of the podium for private startup valuation, behind Uber and Xiaomi. The Chinese e-commerce giant is on a shopping spree, buying stakes in anything from e-commerce to cloud storage and taxi apps. They've usually been moves in a proxy war with the other Chinese tech giants, Tencent and Baidu. Not here though.

Lyft, the comparatively poor Uber competitor, raised $530 million in a round led by Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant. That values Lyft at $2.5 billion, a sum Snapchat sneezed at last year.

InMobi is not in talks with Google, CEO Naveen Tewari insists. Rumors that Google would acquire the Indian mobile advertising company surfaced yesterday. Tewari says he intends to stay independent and eventually IPO.

Soulcycle is considering an IPO too. The stationary biking chain with a cult following only CrossFit can rival is a big deal to New Yorkers. The company has 36 locations in the US and plans to expand worldwide.

US banks have passed the Fed's stress tests, but barely for some. These tests determine whether the banks could withstand major financial upheaval and are required before they can increase their returns to investors. Citigroup screwed up the curve; Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley passed unconvincingly; Bank of America has to take the make-up test. Deutsche Bank and Santander flunk. Within minutes, banks announced massive dividend increases and $23 billion in stock buybacks.

The average bonus on Wall Street in 2014 was $172,860. As profits took a hit, mostly due to allocations for legal settlements in cases resulting from the 2008 financial crisis, bonuses went up only 2 percent. Still they're back to nearly historical records, close to what they were before the crisis.

Richard Branson is being accused of stealing a business idea. Colin Veitch, former CEO of Norwegian Cruise Lines, claims the plans for a cruise line – the latest industry to get "Virginized" – were his and the mogul reneged on their deal.

Cards Against Humanity, the board game that has made board games cool again, is now available online, for that party when you forgot the cards. It doesn't come from the original makers but from a third-party site, all straight up and legal because the game was released under a Creative Commons license (which makes it that much cooler). Procrastination starts here – once the site is back up.

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