- Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) recently announced it is buying a company called Kustomer. These are the details about the deal.
Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) recently announced it is buying a company called Kustomer. The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but sources with The Wall Street Journal reported that it was for over $1 billion.
Kustomer is a customer relationship management company and Facebook is going to integrate its technologies to ramp up its e-commerce operations.
Essentially, Kustomer enables businesses to collect and respond to customer communications much more seamlessly. And through the acquisition of Kustomer, businesses and customers will gain additional interaction support on Facebook and its apps Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Over 175 million people currently contact businesses through WhatsApp and that number is growing fast.
Kustomer founders Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel previously worked at Salesforce. Prior to joining Salesforce, they had sold a customer app called Assistly to Salesforce in 2011 for $80 million.
“Facebook plans to support Kustomer’s operations by providing the resources it needs to scale its business, improve and innovate its product offering, and delight its customers. That way, more people will benefit from customer service that is faster, richer and available whenever and however they need it, whether it’s phone, email, web chat or messaging,” wrote Facebook VP of Ads and Business Products Dan Levy and WhatsApp COO Matt Idema in a blog post. “Kustomer is one of many solutions in this arena, and we’ll continue to support the numerous options that businesses have to integrate their CRM platform of choice with our messaging services. We want businesses of all sizes and across all industries to discover the value of messaging — and having a vibrant partner ecosystem is critical in providing our customers with choices.”
Facebook pointed out that Kustomer businesses will continue to own the data that comes from interactions with their customers. And Facebook said it eventually expects to host Kustomer data on secure Facebook infrastructure. By doing this, Facebook will be able to act as a service provider at the instruction of business customers.
Disclosure: I have a small FB position in my stock portfolio.
