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Facebook, yesterday, made one of the most significant acquisitions it has ever made, as the social media giant continues to develop the services it provides to businesses via their platform. The company acquired Kustomer- a startup platform that specializes in customer service using chat boxes.

The deal was announced by the social media titan on Monday, however, no terms of the deal were posted. The Wall Street Journal in an article reported that the startup is valued at a little over $ 1 billion. According to PitchBook, the startup in private funding was valued at $ 710 million a year ago.

Customers in the modern era tend to contact businesses by messaging rather than calling. Kustomer (a startup that already works with Facebook) allows companies to respond to customer inquiries that come in through Facebook Messenger. In October, the company said that they also started to work with Facebook’s Instagram messaging.

“Kustomer is an omnichannel CRM platform that brings customer conversations from various channels together into a single-screen view. It helps businesses automate repetitive tasks so their agents can maximize the time and quality of interactions with customers. 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,” Facebook said in the blog post, announcing the acquisition.

Kustomer was founded in 2015 by Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel. Investors of the startup include companies like Coatue, Tiger Global Management, Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, and Social Leverage.

A lot of businesses today use Facebook as their primary online platform instead of having an application or website of their own. These people use Facebook Messenger or the Instagram Messenger, or WhatsApp as their primary contact source. According to the report, nearly 175 million people use these services, and Facebook, which has over 2 billion users is trying to attract more people by developing the service, hence the acquisition. Facebook has recently done a lot to give this feature a push. They also have updated WhatsApp which now makes it easier for businesses to sell their products through it.

Facebook, which has a valuation of over $ 790 billion has a history of acquisitions. One of the most famous acquisitions was Instagram which they acquired back in 2012 for just around $ 1 billion. In 2014, they acquired WhatsApp for $ 19 billion, and recently it also bought Giphy, a platform where users can search for GIFs.

 

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