Facebook buys Kustomer for $1B to expand into customer service tools
Today Facebook made one of its biggest plays yet to build out the services it provides to businesses on its platform: It is acquiring Kustomer, a startup founded with the aim of disrupting the customer services industry with a new approach to providing agents with better data and a more unified picture of users by bringing together the many social media and other channels and longer history between them and the company in question.
Terms are not being disclosed, but we have confirmed with sources very close to the deal that it was for $1 billion. Reports of the deal (and alleged price) were published earlier today by the WSJ.
Kustomer — co-founded by CEO Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel (the two worked together across a range of other places, including Airtime and AOL and had sold a previous startup to Salesforce) — had raised around $174 million in private funding from investors that included Coatue, Tiger Global Management, Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures and Social Leverage. It was last valued at $710 million, according to estimates from PitchBook.
Facebook’s interest in Kustomer is very straightforward, while at the same time a very significant sign of what it hopes to do strategically.
