WhatsApp And Sequoia Capital, The Most Brilliant Investment No One Talks About

In 2011, Sequoia Capital put $8 million into an obscure messaging app called WhatsApp.

The deal was led by Jim Goetz, who also invested in AdMob and Palo Alto Networks. To date, Sequoia is the only venture partner in WhatsApp. The company hasn't raised any more money.

WhatsApp is extremely quiet on the PR front. The company doesn't even have a marketing person in place. But it's a massive company that processes more than 27 billion messages in a day.

In October, WhatsApp's CEO Jan Koum revealed that the service had 350 million monthly active users, up from 300 million in August. That's bigger than Twitter.

The Santa Clara-based company was founded by two former Yahoo employees, Brian Acton and Koum, in 2009.

new daily record: 10B+ msgs sent (inbound) and 17B+ msgs received (outbound) by our users = 27 Billion msgs handled in just 24 hours!

- WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) June 12, 2013