Tech

There's Only One Lucky Investor Who Got A Piece Of $19 Billion WhatsApp

By Alyson Shontell
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Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Jim Goetz  Flickr via Dow Jones Events

Facebook just bought messaging app monster WhatsApp in a $19 billion deal.

WhatsApp never raised much outside funding, except from one lucky VC firm: Sequoia Capital.

In 2011, Sequoia Capital put $8 million into an obscure messaging app called WhatsApp.*

The deal was led by Jim Goetz, who also invested in AdMob and Palo Alto Networks. To date, Sequoia is the only venture partner in WhatsApp. The company hasn't raised any more money.

WhatsApp is extremely quiet on the PR front. The company doesn't even have a marketing person in place. But it's a massive company that processes more than 27 billion messages in a day.

In October, WhatsApp's CEO Jan Koum revealed that the service had 350 million monthly active users, up from 300 million in August. That's bigger than Twitter. Now the app has over 400 million monthly active users.

The Santa Clara-based company was founded by two former Yahoo employees, Brian Acton and Koum, in 2009.

*Update: TechCrunch's Ryan Lawler says WhatsApp raised two additional round of funding led by Sequoia Capital that were never reported, including a $50 million Series S round. Lawler estimates that Sequoia's ownership of WhatsApp is in the "teens."

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Alyson Shontell Business Insider
Alyson Shontell
Alyson is the Editor-in-Chief and CCO at Fortune.  She was previously a co Editor-in-Chief overseeing Business Insider's tech and business coverage.She joined Business Insider in July 2008 as the company's sixth employee. She started as a sales planner before joining the editorial team in 2010, where she became a startup reporter and was first to cover some of today's largest tech companies, including Pinterest, Tinder, Instagram, Uber and Snap. Alyson rose to become a senior correspondent, then Executive Editor.She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider in 2016, at which point she became the youngest and only woman to run a global business publication. Under her leadership, the business division has grown to hundreds of  millions of monthly readers.Alyson was a host of  Insider's conferences and launched a podcast, "Success! How I Did It," where she interviewed influencers ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Ballmer about their career paths (subscribe on iTunes here).She has appeared on ABC, Good Morning America, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and CBC, and she has interviewed media personalities such as Megyn Kelly, technology leaders like Fred Wilson, political leaders like John Brennan, and sports star LeBron James. She is a judge for the prestigious Gerald Loeb Awards in business journalism, and has been named one of Min's Rising Stars in Media, as well as Folio's 2017 Top Women in Media.She graduated from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she majored in psychology and advertising.You can read some of her investigative articles here:— Leaked videos reveal the true founding story of Snapchat— The founder who dumped Jared Kushner: Inside the phone call that left the White House star in a fit of rage— The downfall of billion-dollar startup, Fab— How a startup that raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history blew itself up before it even launched— The dark side of Facebook, where people lie, cheat, and make millions— A profile of Uber's controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick— The mystery of Jody Sherman, a founder who was driven to suicide and left behind a shocking business disasterDisclosure: Alyson owns bitcoin and Snap. She is also an investor in The Spun, a sports-media startup founded by her husband.
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