WhatsApp Messenger is an American freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service owned by Facebook, Inc. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app targeted at small business owners, called WhatsApp Business. The client application was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19. 3 billion.
About WhatsApp in brief
WhatsApp Messenger is an American freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service owned by Facebook, Inc. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media. The service requires users to provide a standard cellular mobile number for registering with the service. 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 client application was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19. 3 billion. It became the world’s most popular messaging application by 2015, and has over 2 billion users worldwide as of February 2020. 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. In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook claimed that it acquired 8million new users and 2 million new Line users; it was scheduled to over four years subsequent to closing of the acquisition. The acquisition caused a considerable amount of anger across social media, leading to a loss of users and a move to other message services such as Telegram, Line, and WhatsApp’s competitor, Facebook Messenger.
In February 2014, just one year after a venture capital financing round at a USD 1. 5 billion valuation, Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. In October 2009, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo!, founded WhatsApp. Acton persuaded five former friends at Yahoo! to invest USD 250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to the iOS version. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in Apple’s U.S. App Store. In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about USD 8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Jim Goetz. By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 millionactive users and 50 staff members. In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app. In November 2009, WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,00. At the time, it was estimated that it was approximately 5000 users. At approximate 5000 it was the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history, which paid an approximate USD 4billion in cash, USD 12billion in shares, and additional USD 3billion in restricted stock, and USD 3bn in shares. It was valued at $1.5 billion at the time.
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This page is based on the article WhatsApp published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
