WhatsApp Net worth Money and More
Net Worth: $19 billion
Revenue 2013: $ 20 million
WhatsApp Messenger or WhatsApp as we commonly know it is an indispensable part of our life today with almost all the smart phone users trying out this smart app that changed the messaging scenario in the world. WhatsApp is a cross platform instant messaging subscription service that uses internet and mobile data for communication and is supported by all the smartphones. WhatsApp client software is available for iPhone, Blackberry 10, Windows Phone, Nokia S40, Symbian, Nokia Asha platform and Google Android. WhatsApp faces stiff competition from its Asian and European based instant messaging services like LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and Telegram but this easy to use and mobile-friendly app with its cool user experience comes at a nominal price of $1 per year and is viewed as a cheap alternative to SMS for people in developing countries, this is why WhatsApp sits on the top when it comes to instant message service providers.
WhatsApp- History:
WhatsApp’s story is something like a rags to riches one, its founder Jan Koum had an incredible journey from living on food stamps as a teenager to being the CEO of an instant messaging giant. Born in Kiev, Ukraine on 24th February, 1976 Jan Koum is the founder of WhatsApp and Brain Acton its co-founder. Both of them were employed in Yahoo and worked there for over a decade tuning back-end software to serve ads and worked on the much-delayed and boring project of Yahoo, which was advertising platform Project Panama in 2006, 1 year into the project they realized that life doesn’t become any better by making advertisements work better. In September 2007 Koum and Acton finally left Yahoo for the good and took a year off and travelled around South America. In January 2009 Koum bought an iPhone while he was still unemployed and was eating into his $400,000 savings from Yahoo, within days he realized that the seven month old App Store has the potential to develop and spawn into a new industry. Desperately in need of an iPhone developer Koum met Igor Solomennikov a developer in Russia and he immediately chose the name WhatsApp as it sounded like “what’s up?” and a week later on his birthday i.e on February 24th 2009, he started WhatsApp Inc. in California and later Koum spent days creating the back-end code to synch the app with all the phone numbers in the world and he kept on updating it but he didn’t taste any success and was contemplating quitting when Acton advised him to work and give some more time to it. WhatsApp hit the jackpot in June 2009 when Apple launched push notifications letting developers ping users when they weren’t using an app, so Koum updated WhatsApp such that whenever you changed status it would ping everyone in your network and at that point it sort of became instant messaging and its active user base suddenly swelled to 250,000.
WhatsApp Net worth:
Koum visited Brian Acton who was still unemployed and he joined the start-up and persuaded his five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding. WhatsApp switched from being free to paid service and in December 2009 WhatsApp moved a step further when it was updated to send photos and by early 2011, WhatsApp featured in all the lists of top 20 US App Store. In addition to the $ 250,000 seed funding the founders negotiated with Sequoia Capital and its partner Jim Goetz agreed to pay $ 7 million. WhatsApp’s dream run continued and its user base sky-rocketed reaching a whopping 200 million active users by February 2013 and its staff increased to 50. Sequoia Capital sensing the tremendous rise of WhatsApp invested another $50 million taking the total worth of WhatsApp to $ 1.5 billion. This instant messaging service handles more than 10 billion messages each day and on June 13, 2013 they processed a record high of 27 billion messages on a single day and it broke it own record on April 1 when they processed 64 billion messages in a single day. In a recent official blog post released on 23rd April 2014, by WhatsApp Inc. the numbers showed that this instant messaging wonder is readily finding users at an astounding pace leaving its counterparts far behind, it announced that the app now has over 500 million active users around the world and they share around 700 million photos and 100 million videos daily.
Billion Dollar Acquisition:
A company with a total worth of just $ 2-3 million based on the 500 million active users with a potential to grow even further beyond expectations didn’t see this acquisition coming but the founder and co-founder had other plans when they planned to sell of their baby the instant messaging app “WhatsApp”. On 19th February, 2014 Facebook the big daddy of social networking world announced that they were going to buy WhatsApp for US $ 19 billion, which will be the largest acquisition to date. Facebook agreed to pay with 184 million common shares of stocks, $ 4 billion in cash and promised to set aside 46 million extra share of stock that will be vested for the WhatsApp founders as long as the company remains.
Watch Out For:
Koum the founder of WhatsApp told Recode at a recent press conference that despite the fast growth of the app focus will remain on providing clean and usable instant messaging service to the people and he also said that free voice call feature may come into being in the near future, a utopian dream but if realized that will surely give the mobile sim service providers a run for their money.
Quotes:
Financial Times:
WhatsApp “has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines.
