Meet the person who immigrated to us as a teenager once swept for floors, later one of the most popular apps, his fortune …

Imagine that you leave your country at the age of 16, comprehensive floors in a foreign country to make ends meet, and will then find one of the most popular technology products known to humans. This is the incredible story of Jan Koum, a Jewish man born in Ukraine and assumes a service with over two billion people around the world. Read on to learn more about him.

Personal life
Jan Borysovych Koum, 49, was born in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in 1976. A single child, Koum, moved to the US state of California in 1992 at the age of 16 with his mother in the US state of California. His father, who had stayed in Ukraine, died only five years later in 1997.
In his early years, Koum accepted a cleaning job in a grocery store and relied on food brands to eat itself.

Tech career
Koum wrote down at San Jose State University, but was out of the question to pursue career opportunities. His first decent job was as a security tester at Ernst & Young. In 1997 he moved to Yahoo! Almost a decade work there as an infrastructure engineer. The turning point came in Koum's life when he became 33 when he founded WhatsApp -a pioneering instant -messaging app, which is the most popular in the domain today. The product was acquired in 2014 by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook for a whopping USD 22 billion, just five years after its introduction. At the beginning of 2025, WhatsApp had more than two billion (200 crore) users in over 180 countries.

Later undertakings
In 2018, Koum resigned as Chief Executive Officer from WhatsApp and also announced his decision to leave Facebook's board.
He is now investing through his company Newland. Although Koum has founded one of the most popular apps of all time, it is known that Koum maintains a low profile and mainly avoids the attention of the media.

Net value
According to estimates of the Forbes magazine, Koum has a net assets of $ 16.6 billion, which ranks him to the richest in the world.