Instagram, Inc. (which also appears in filings as Instagram, LLC) is the photo- and video-sharing social media platform founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and headquartered at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for roughly $1 billion; it is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META), which is Instagram's sole member and has no parent of its own. Instagram issues no stock and does not report separate revenue or headcount; Meta does not break out Instagram's financials, and Meta's total 2025 revenue was approximately $201 billion.
Products/operations. Instagram operates a consumer social platform whose main offerings are the photo/video feed, Stories, Reels, direct messaging, and commerce/advertising tools (e.g., Shopping and paid ads). Substantially all of Meta's revenue comes from advertising sold across Facebook and Instagram, so Instagram is an operating, advertising-monetized business rather than a licensor. It is not an NPE.
Litigation posture. Our database records exactly one appearance for Instagram: as a plaintiff (petitioner) in a Patent Trial and Appeal Board proceeding, with zero appearances as a defendant. That pattern is consistent with an operating company on the defensive side of patent disputes — here, using PTAB challenges rather than asserting its own patents. No cases are recorded in plaintiff-friendly district venues such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al. v. VL Collective IP LLC (2023-05-24) covers the inter partes reviews Instagram filed alongside Meta Platforms, WhatsApp, Meta Platforms Technologies, and Giphy against VL Collective IP LLC (IPR2023-00923 on U.S. Patent 7,266,682; IPR2023-00924 on U.S. Patent 7,436,980). VL Collective is a subsidiary of VL IP Holdings LLC and VideoLabs, Inc., a video-focused licensing entity; the reviews ran parallel to VideoLabs, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-00680 (D. Del., filed May 24, 2022), which asserted H.264 video-coding patents against Meta entities.