Kustomer is part of Meta’s plan to profit from private chats
Meta Platforms was finally allowed to complete its acquisition of Kustomer after more than a year of antitrust scrutiny. Meta, which owns Facebook, announced that the deal “complied with all regulatory requirements” in a blog update. Meta first announced the acquisition, valued at more than $1 billion, in November 2020, but the company was sued by the Federal Trade Commission shortly after for “illegal monopolisation,” raising questions about whether regulators would approve the Kustomer acquisition.
The company passed an FTC review, and a separate approval by antitrust authorities in the U.K. Kustomer builds software so that businesses can manage customer messages from multiple services on one central dashboard, central to Meta’s plan to make money off of its two messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger. Meta hopes businesses will use WhatsApp, which has more than 2 billion monthly users, in lieu of other forms of customer communication, like email or 1-800 numbers.
Meta has been under intense regulatory scrutiny in recent years. An FTC lawsuit seeks to break up Meta by requiring the company to spin off its WhatsApp and Instagram purchases. The ongoing lawsuit has raised concerns that Meta, arguably making some of the best acquisitions in tech history, will struggle to complete future deals.
