Canadian messaging firm Kik Interactive is apparently exploring a sale or corporate investment, Bloomberg reported.

The company apparently hired advisers (Qatalyst Partners) to set up conversations with potential suitors in Silicon Valley and Asia, although as yet it has not “found an attractive deal”.

But the report also noted that Kik has “about two years’ worth of financing” and isn’t in danger of running out of cash – meaning that it should be able to negotiate a deal on its own terms.

Late in January, Kik said it had passed 200 million registered users – while pouring scorn on this metric, as well as the “monthly active user” figure preferred by some of its rivals.

“Other companies make a big deal about MAU, but we think they might as well be called ‘minimally active users.’ It’s a metric so easy to game that it becomes almost meaningless,” Ted Livingston, CEO, wrote.

Instead, it cited a study it had commissioned which showed that Kik users spend 35 minutes per session in its app – compared with 37 minutes for Facebook, 27 minutes for Instagram, and 21 minutes for Snapchat.

And of course, interest in the messaging space is as strong as ever, with Alibaba recently having invested $200 million in Snapchat in a deal which valued the latter at $15 billion.

This, in turn, followed Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $22 billion, and Rakuten’s earlier buy of Viber for $900 million (Viber had 280 million registered users at this point).

Following the WhatsApp and Viber deals, Livingston said that the intention was for Kik to remain independent to reach its lofty goals.