EU Conditionally Approves Facebook Parent’s Buy of Kustomer

The chief regulator of the EU has approved Meta Platforms’ acquisition of Kustomer, a report from Seeking Alpha says, which concludes a saga that was fraught with various dramas.

Meta, formerly known as Facebook when the saga began, has reached a deal that values Kustomer at over $1 billion as of Nov. 2020.

Kustomer is a customer service startup and competes with others like Zendesk.

By getting the approval at last, Meta agrees to a 10 year commitment to offer nondiscriminatory access to its public APIs for messaging channels. In addition, it will agree that “To the extent any features or functionalities of Messenger, Instagram messaging or WhatsApp that are used by Kustomer’s customers today may be improved or updated, Meta commits to also make available equivalent improvements to Kustomer’s rivals and new entrants.”

The M&A request led to heavy scrutiny in both the U.S. and elsewhere.

The European Commission had rolled out a probe of the deal. The FTC had been looking into it since the spring.

Kustomer, while not a large company, was still “important,” the EC says, because it wanted to carefully look into transactions that could “further strengthen large players that increasingly dominate the digital economy, irrespective of the target company’s size.”

“Our decision today will ensure that innovative rivals and new entrants in the customer relationship management software market can effectively compete,” said the EC’s Margrethe Vestager.

PYMNTS wrote that the Kustomer acquisition was approved by U.K. regulators in September. The report says that regulators there determined the deal probably wouldn’t result in less competition.

Read more: UK Antitrust Regulators Approve Facebook’s Kustomer Acquisition

Kustomer was founded in 2015 as an omnichannel SaaS company and consumer relationship management firm. Facebook had been looking at it as a way to boost its WhatsApp messaging service. The service had seen more popularity amid the pandemic.