Who Owns WhatsApp And Why Was It Price $19 Billion?

In February 2009, former Yahoo worker Jan Koum conceived the primary draft of WhatsApp after being amazed by the prospects of the rising iOS App Retailer. Named after the phrase “What’s up?” early-stage WhatsApp did not supply messaging as a service however allowed customers to share brief statuses. It was initially solely launched on iOS and made out there for BlackBerry telephones within the following months. Assist for Android and Symbian did not arrive till mid-2010, however Koum stored enhancing WhatsApp for iOS.

In June 2009, an important Apple replace allowed iOS apps to ship push notifications, and WhatsApp was instantly up to date to ship a notification each time somebody up to date their standing. This enabled early customers to share frequent updates and deal with the function as a gaggle chat.

Koum realized WhatsApp’s potential as an instantaneous messenger and added direct messaging in August 2009. It grew to become immensely fashionable as a result of the one different various on the time and not using a restrict on the variety of messages (bear in mind once you solely received 500 texts a month?) was BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which, too, was restricted to BlackBerry telephones. Prompt messaging catapulted WhatsApp to having 250,000 customers.

In November 2009, Koum’s shut buddy and former colleague from Yahoo, Brian Acton, grew to become a co-founder by bringing seed funding value $250,000 from 5 different ex-Yahoo staff. In December, WhatsApp added the power to ship photographs on iOS, making it a richer model of MMS with out a lot high quality loss.