Quick Answer
How many employees does WhatsApp have in 2025?
WhatsApp has approximately 3,042 employees, as of Q2 2022.
People love to communicate and get updates from their loved ones.
Through messaging platforms, we can easily connect with different people from afar.
The most popular mobile messenger app in the world is WhatsApp, which has more than 2 billion active users per month.
This instant messaging app allows consumers to send text, voice, image, and video messages, as well as video and voice calling for free.
Have you ever wondered who developed this app and how many employees WhatsApp has?
You’ll get surprised about the number of employees working for WhatsApp. Just keep reading.
WhatsApp Employees: How Many Employees Does WhatsApp Have in 2025?
WhatsApp is one of the most-used messaging platforms worldwide, available on mobile devices and in locations with low connectivity.
More people use it since it is a free yet reliable app to talk to anyone across 180 countries.
WhatsApp does not disclose the exact number of its employees.
However, based on RocketReach, WhatsApp recorded approximately 3,042 employees in Q2 2022.
When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014, it only had 35 engineers.
During that time, the platform reached around 465 million monthly active users.
Imagine having a few employees that can manage to provide immense performance.
After a year, it employed more engineers, making a total of 50 engineers.
WhatsApp Inc. Team
In the most recent report of RocketReach, WhatsApp Inc. has 3,042 employees from different departments.
This includes Sales, Engineering, Operations, Design, Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, IT, Customer Service, Education, Media, Health, Legal, Real Estate, and Public Relations Departments.
Here are the numbers of WhatsApp employees per department in Q2 2022, based on the RocketReach report:
- There were 540 employees in WhatsApp Sales Department in Q2 2022
- There were 452 employees in WhatsApp Engineering Department in Q2 2022
- There were 316 employees in WhatsApp Operations Department in Q2 2022
- There were 219 employees in WhatsApp Design Department in Q2 2022
Other WhatsApp Departments
Here are other WhatsApp employees per department:
- There were 89 employees in WhatsApp Marketing Department in Q2 2022
- There were 86 employees in WhatsApp Finance Department in Q2 2022
- There were 86 employees in WhatsApp HR Department in Q2 2022
- There were 65 employees in WhatsApp Education Department in Q2 2022
- There were 41 employees in WhatsApp Media Department in Q2 2022
- There were 29 employees in WhatsApp Legal Department in Q2 2022
- There were 26 employees in WhatsApp Health Department in Q2 2022
- There were 31 employees in WhatsApp Customer Service Department in Q2 2022
- There were 5 employees in WhatsApp Real Estate Department in Q2 2022
- There were 2 employees in WhatsApp Public Relations Department in Q2 2022
- There were 1,052 employees in other WhatsApp Departments in Q2 2022
Who Created WhatsApp?
WhatsApp was created in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. They are former employees of Yahoo.
Jan saw the potential of WhatsApp to operate in the Apple App Store when he purchased his iPhone. He discussed his idea with Brian, and they visited Alex Fishman.
Alex introduced the two to Igor Solomennikov, a Russian developer.
They succeeded in developing the app. Jan named the platform “WhatsApp,” like a status “what’s up.”
Brief History of WhatsApp
WhatsApp’s design was initially focused on “statuses” near the users’ names until it optimized a new push notification update.
It notifies the networks of the users with status updates when users change their status on the app.
When users saw that it was similar to an instant messaging service, its developers incorporated the messaging function in WhatsApp 2.0.
The instant messaging function became the platform’s main feature.
People love that they can log in using their phone numbers and send messages using the internet instead of SMS plans.
Brian Acton convinced five former employees of Yahoo to invest in seed funding worth $250,000 in October 2009.
WhatsApp stood out and became the market player in which different companies asked about the prospects of the platform.
Facebook saw WhatsApp as a potential threat to its messaging platform. In 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $21.8 billion.
Join WhatsApp
According to the company’s website, they love talking to engineers with high engineering bars and are passionate and interested in building messaging infrastructure and creating a new frontier in WhatsApp privacy, and payment systems.
Here are some of the WhatsApp engineering positions you can join:
- WhatsApp Server Engineering
- WhatsApp Client Engineering
- WhatsApp Privacy Engineering
- WhatsApp Integrity Engineering
- WhatsApp Business Engineering
WhatsApp Users
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging platforms in more than 180 countries worldwide.
As of 2023, it has over 2 billion active users, up from 1 billion in 2016 and 465 million in 2014.
India recorded the highest number of WhatsApp active users per month, accounting for 487.5 million users.
Brazil comes next with 118.5 million and Indonesia with 84.8 million.
Let’s take a look at the numbers of WhatsApp active users based on Business of Apps data:
- In 2016, WhatsApp had 1.07 billion active users
- In 2018, WhatsApp had 1.56 billion active users
- In 2020, WhatsApp had 2.10 billion active users
- In 2022, WhatsApp had 2.41 billion active users
8 Facts about WhatsApp
Below are some facts about WhatsApp that you might not know:
- WhatsApp outranked WeChat and Facebook Messenger in terms of users. It has over 2 billion users, while WeChat has 1.2 billion, and Facebook Messenger has 988 million.
- WhatsApp had only 50 engineers for its 900 million active users in 2015.
- As of 2023, about 1,985 WhatsApp employees registered on LinkedIn.
- Around 100 billion messages were sent daily through WhatsApp in Q3 2020, up by nearly 70% from Q4 2017.
- In 2017, WhatsApp was downloaded 924,000,000 times and became the most downloaded app worldwide. Today, it is the eighth most downloaded app in the Google Play Store.
- In 2019, about 53% of the platform’s users in the United States used it at least once daily.
- According to Investopedia, Facebook bids WhatsApp for $16 billion, around $4 billion in cash, and $12 billion in Facebook shares. It agreed to pay an additional $3.6 billion as employee compensation, making it a total of $19.6 billion. However, Facebook share prices ballooned from $68 to $77.56. Facebook paid a total of $21.8 billion.
- Users spent 19.4 hours monthly on WhatsApp in 2020.
Conclusion
Now you have an idea of who created WhatsApp, its current owner, and how many employees WhatsApp has in 2025.
Compared to other tech companies, WhatsApp has a small team.
Nevertheless, their employees still provided seamless messaging experiences to more than 2.4 billion users across 180 countries worldwide.
