WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, both former Yahoo engineers. The app started as a simple status-update tool before pivoting to instant messaging. By 2014, it had grown so fast that Meta (then Facebook) acquired it for roughly $19 billion — one of the largest tech acquisitions in history.
Today, WhatsApp serves more than 2 billion monthly active users across 180+ countries. It’s the default messaging platform in much of Latin America, India, Europe, and Africa. The app offers end-to-end encryption for messages, voice calls, and video calls, which it rolled out globally in 2016 using the Signal Protocol.
WhatsApp Business, launched in 2018, lets small companies communicate with customers directly. There’s also the WhatsApp Business API for larger enterprises, which has become a significant revenue driver. In India alone, WhatsApp Pay enables in-app payments through UPI integration.
The platform handles over 100 billion messages daily and supports group chats of up to 1,024 participants. WhatsApp’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California, though its engineering teams are distributed globally. Despite its massive scale, the app runs on a surprisingly lean infrastructure — its original team of around 50 engineers managed a user base of hundreds of millions.
WhatsApp Channels, introduced in 2023, brought one-way broadcast messaging to the platform, letting organizations and public figures reach followers directly.
