Fund II Portfolio Company Kustomer Acquired by FaceBook Parent Company Meta

I’m excited to announce Facebook parent company Meta has closed the acquisition of our Fund II portfolio company Kustomer.

Facebook initially reached an agreement to acquire Kustomer in November of 2020, but the deal was subject to an FTC review, and a separate approval by authorities in the U.K. and the E.U. As of today, all regulatory requirements for closing have been met. 

Seeing our founders succeed at this level is always exciting, but this one is particularly special. I’ve known Kustomer founder and CEO Brad Birnbaum since the 7th grade. We remained friends throughout High School. Brad recruited me to his first startup back in late 1996, and he recruited Kustomer co-founder and CTO Jeremy Suriel in early 1997. As legend has it, the sole criteria for the decision was learning that Jeremy got an A in a particularly difficult computer science class at Stony Brook University.  Combined with our other lifelong friend from 8th grade, Alex Bard (now at Redpoint, and also an investor in Kustomer), we've built multiple companies. The journey has encompassed eShare, eAssist (which later acquired eShare assets), Goowy (acquired by AOL)  and most recently culminating with Assistly, where Howard and Tom were early investors through to the final exit when Assistly was acquired by Salesforce. 

This multi-decade journey compounded the knowledge, insight, and experience into what was required to build a killer product for this market. Brad and Jeremy’s domain expertise led them to build a beautiful front end experience coupled with a extensible backend that really resonated with the market and allowed them to onboard some incredible companies as early customers.  Brad and Jeremy's hard work, intuition, ability to build teams and onboard customers, along with their skill at navigating multiple successful exits made our investment in Kustomer one of the easiest decisions we've ever made!  We're so happy for the entire Kustomer team and wish them all Kongrats!