WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo!. After leaving Yahoo! in September 2007, they took a while off in South America.[10] At one point, they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.
In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing the potential of the app industry on the App Store, Koum and Acton began visiting Koum's friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose to debate a replacement sort of messaging app that might "[show] statuses next to individual names of the people". They realized that to require the thought further, they'd need an iPhone developer. Fishman visited RentACoder.com, found Russian developer Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum.
Koum named the app WhatsApp to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered abandoning and searching for a replacement job. Acton encouraged him to attend for a "few more months".
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged once they weren't using an app. Koum changed WhatsApp in order that when a user's status is modified , everyone within the user's network would be notified.[10] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and therefore the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000. Although Acton was managing another startup, he decided to hitch the corporate .[10] In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends at Yahoo! to take a position $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined WhatsApp on All Saints' Day .After months at beta stage, the appliance launched in November 2009, exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired a lover in l. a. , Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.
To cover the first cost of sending verification texts to users, WhatsApp was changed from a free service to a paid one. In December 2009, the power to send photos was added to the iPhone version. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one among the highest 20 apps at Apple's U.S. App Store.
In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for quite 15% of the corporate , after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.
By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service monthly .
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