Facebook said on Wednesday that it agreed to buy WhatsApp for about $16 billion to expand into the fast-growing mobile messaging market.
Facebook is paying $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stock for WhatsApp, a service that has 450 million monthly users and is...
adding more than 1 million new users a day.
"WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement announcing the deal.
Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capitol, the investment firm that provided WhatsApp with $8 million in funding – the only funding the company received, according to Crunchbase – sought to explain the $19 billion sum fetched by WhatsApp in a blog post, attributing the staggering acquisition amount to the app’s exploding active userbase, the company’s “legendary” team of just 32 engineers, Koum’s and Acton’s devotion to “building a pure messaging experience,” and the fact that WhatsApp spent exactly $0 on marketing.
Facebook is also throwing in an extra $3 billion in restricted stock units that will go to WhatsApp’s employees; those will vest over a period of four years after the acquisition is finalized
Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capitol, the investment firm that provided WhatsApp with $8 million in funding – the only funding the company received, according to Crunchbase – sought to explain the $19 billion sum fetched by WhatsApp in a blog post, attributing the staggering acquisition amount to the app’s exploding active userbase, the company’s “legendary” team of just 32 engineers, Koum’s and Acton’s devotion to “building a pure messaging experience,” and the fact that WhatsApp spent exactly $0 on marketing.
Facebook is also throwing in an extra $3 billion in restricted stock units that will go to WhatsApp’s employees; those will vest over a period of four years after the acquisition is finalized
Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/19/facebook-buys-whatsapp/5617657/
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5427332/facebook-is-buying-whatsapp
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/facebook-buy-whatsapp-16-billion/
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