SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is facing the glare of regulators for buying up promising start-ups and neutralizing them as a competitive threat. Facebook announced on Monday that it planned to acquire Kustomer, a customer relationship management start-up, to help it build its e-commerce business. The deal values Kustomer at close to $1 billion, said two people with knowledge of the talks. Kustomer, which is based in New York, had raised roughly $170 million in venture funding, according to data compiled by Crunchbase. More than 175 million people contact businesses using WhatsApp, Facebook said.

Source: New York Times November 30, 2020 17:53 UTC