The acquisition caused a considerable number of users to try and/or move to other message services. Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media. Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing. Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and (advised by Morgan Stanley) an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders Koum and Acton. Sequoia Capital received an approximate 5000% return on its initial investment. At the time, it was the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history. announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. On February 19, 2014, just one year after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook, Inc. In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion. In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.īy February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in Apple's U.S. In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to the iOS version. To cover the cost of sending verification texts to users, WhatsApp was changed from a free service to a paid one. In 2010, WhatsApp was subject to multiple acquisition offers from Google which were declined. Koum then hired a friend in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later. After months at beta stage, the application launched in November 2009, exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. He officially joined WhatsApp on November 1. In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends at Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. Although Acton was working on another startup idea, he decided to join the company. WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000. Koum changed WhatsApp so that everyone in the user's network would be notified when a user's status is changed. In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app. Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months". However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job. On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. Koum named the app WhatsApp to sound like "what's up". Fishman visited, found Russian developer Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum. They realized that to take the idea further, they would need an iPhone developer. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing the potential of the app industry on the App Store, Koum and Acton began visiting Koum's friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose to discuss a new type of messaging app that would "show statuses next to individual names of the people". WhatsApp was founded in by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo!. It has become the primary means of electronic communication in multiple countries and locations, including Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, and large parts of Europe and Africa. It became the world's most popular messaging application by 2015, and has over 2 billion users worldwide as of February 2020. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion. The client application was created by WhatsApp Inc. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app targeted at small business owners, called WhatsApp Business, to allow companies to communicate with customers who use the standard WhatsApp client. The service requires users to provide a standard cellular mobile number for registering with the service. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices but is also accessible from desktop computers, as long as the user's mobile device remains connected to the Internet while they use the desktop app. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media. WhatsApp Messenger, or simply WhatsApp, is an American freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook, Inc.
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