Facebook is the social media platform we all are entirely aware of. In 2004, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and four Harvard College roommates launched Meta Inc. (FB), the company that runs Facebook, the world’s largest social networking website.
About Meta
FaceMash was the company’s original name. This changed to TheFacebook before eliminating “The” to become Facebook, which then changed to Meta in October 2021. Initially established for Harvard classmates, Zuckerberg and his co-founders swiftly expanded the service to other campuses. And subsequently to the entire public. Since then, the corporation has developed into a global behemoth with 2.8 billion users and a market capitalization of $926.8 billion. The corporation earned a net income of $29.1 billion in FY 2020 on revenue of $84.1 billion, with advertising accounting for nearly all of it.
Since its inception 16 years ago, Meta has grown far beyond its core social networking platform. Messenger services, photo, and video sharing augmented reality, and a variety of other apps and services are among its offerings. Acquisitions have been critical to the growth of these businesses, as well as Meta’s overall revenue. Meta’s approach has been to acquire potential competitors before they get too large. During this process, the corporation has paid exorbitant fees for some deals. The company has also attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) due to possible anti-competitive behavior, with the FTC recently requesting data on unreported purchases from Meta and other large tech firms.
Below we’re going to talk about the companies owned by Meta.
How Many Companies Does Meta Own?
Over the last 15 years, Facebook has purchased 78 firms. On Aug. 23, 2005, the firm made its first major acquisition, purchasing the Facebook.com domain name for $200,000, officially replacing their previous domain, Thefacebook.com.
Only 27 of the 78 companies that Facebook has purchased have had their costs revealed to the public. The combined value of these 27 agreements was more than $23 billion; think how much higher that figure would be if all 78 Facebook acquisitions had been made public.
These deals aren’t often as straightforward as Facebook paying millions or billions of dollars to buy a firm altogether. Many of these agreements, particularly the hidden ones, were for the smart people running these firms and generating these technologies to join the Facebook team, not just for the technology they generated.
What companies does Facebook own?
Many people have been looking for an answer to this query as this social media behemoth continues to grow and expand its social network with new technology.
Some of the top companies Facebook has acquired include:
- Instagram ($1 billion)
- WhatsApp ($19 billion)
- Oculus VR ($2 billion)
- Onavo (between $100 million and $200 million)
- LiveRail ($500 million)
While you may anticipate seeing technologies like mobile commerce, enhanced communication, photo and video sharing, mobile games, and sports analytics in Facebook’s toolset, you could be surprised by others. An emotion detection app, facial recognition software, and a solar-powered drone manufacturer are among Facebook’s more noteworthy acquisitions.
In recent years, Facebook has placed an increased emphasis on businesses that use artificial intelligence or virtual reality technology. Facebook has placed a premium on utilizing several new technologies to grow its brand and extend well beyond merely being a social media platform for sharing photographs, videos, and likes.
1. Instagram
Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram on April 9, 2012, making it the company’s largest acquisition at the time. Although Instagram was not the most valuable of all the Facebook purchases. It is nevertheless regarded as one of the best business deals in Silicon Valley history. The photo-sharing software had only 30 million users and no money when Facebook purchased it. Instagram now has a billion monthly active users, with 500 million of them using it every day, and is expected to have brought in $8-9 billion in revenue for Facebook in 2018.
2. Whatsapp
Meta purchased WhatsApp at a time when the smaller firm had more than 400 million monthly active users, making it a fast-growing prospective competitor to Facebook’s social media platform. When Meta bought WhatsApp, it was a standalone firm with a recent valuation of $1.5 billion. Although the actual amount of revenue generated by WhatsApp is unknown, some estimates suggest that revenue might cross $6 billion by now.
3. Oculus
Meta bought virtual reality gear and software company Oculus VR just weeks after announcing its acquisition of WhatsApp. This firm came into existence in 2012 and is most known for its virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift, designed specifically for video games. Since Facebook bought Oculus VR in 2014, the company has made many acquisitions. The purchase of Surreal Vision, a business that specializes in 3D scene mapping reconstruction, in 2015 was maybe the most notable.
4. Onavo
Onavo is an Israeli firm that does web analytics on other mobile apps to evaluate client usage. It was founded in 2010. In October 2013, Meta purchased Onavo for an undisclosed sum believed by some experts to be between $100 million and $200 million. Onavo was a stand-alone corporation at the time of the acquisition. Although Onavo was not one of Meta’s larger acquisitions, its technology may have enabled Meta to make critical early decisions about which other firms and apps to acquire.
Onavo has been classed as spyware on a few occasions. This caused Meta to remove the software from both the iOS and Android app stores in the face of backlash.
5. LiveRail
LiveRail, a video publisher monetization platform owned by Facebook, is one of its subsidiaries. The platform gives premium publishers the tools they need to market their video content across all platforms, setting the bar for video advertising solutions. LiveRail is used in the event of maximum performance for all ad printing by a leading publisher who benefits from sophisticated analytics, advanced controls, and transparency. In July 2014, Facebook purchased LiveRail for $400 million to $500 million.