Jan Koum - Whatsapp Founder

Have you ever wondered where Whatsapp comes from? Check out our latest blog post to find out...

Jan Koum, who is the brains behind the communication app WhatsApp, hails from a small village in Ukraine. He was born into poverty, and his family made the move to come and live in California. During his childhood, Koum developed a fascination with computers and emerging technology. Much of his spare time was spent learning about computing, and discovering all he could about how they worked.

This all-consuming hobby would soon grow into a livelihood for him. By the age of 18, it was clear  that he was an expert due to all the time he had invested into learning while growing up. At this young age, he was hired by Yahoo! His first job there was as an infrastructure engineer.

He succeeded in this role, and continued working and building his experience within the same company for a whole decade, and around 2009, with the burgeoning of the smartphone and mobile technology industry, he began to realise that the app industry had incredible potential in the very near future.

​This led to him starting up WhatsApp Inc. Five years later in 2014, WhatsApp had exploded across the world! It was soon bought by Facebook for a mind-boggling $19 million!