Defendant
3 cases as defendant.
Company overview. WhatsApp LLC is a wholly owned operating subsidiary of Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META), the Menlo Park, California–based social media and technology parent. WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton and acquired by Facebook (now Meta) in 2014 for roughly $19–22 billion. Its registered/operating headquarters is listed with Meta at Menlo Park, CA. WhatsApp does not publish standalone financials; for context, parent Meta reported about $201 billion in revenue for FY2025 with roughly 79,000 employees (WSJ, Britannica). Third-party databases list WhatsApp LLC itself as a very small entity (~55 employees, PitchBook), though the app's engineering organization is widely reported to be much larger.
Products / operations. WhatsApp operates the free, end-to-end-encrypted cross-platform messaging service that supports text chat, voice and video calling, group messaging, and file sharing for consumers, plus WhatsApp Business and business-facing APIs that let companies communicate with customers and transact through the app. Meta classifies WhatsApp within its Family of Apps segment alongside Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger (Meta 10-K/Yahoo Finance). WhatsApp is a genuine operating company, not a licensing shell.
Patent-litigation posture. WhatsApp is a classic operating-company defendant: in our tracked database it appears once, solely as a defendant (1 defendant case, 0 plaintiff cases). The case is VideoLabs, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al. (D. Del., filed May 24, 2022), in which WhatsApp was named as a co-defendant subsidiary along with Meta, Instagram, Facebook Technologies, and Giphy. The venue is the District of Delaware, not a plaintiff-friendly district like the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable context. The plaintiff, VideoLabs, is a patent-licensing business that acquired video-related patents from companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Siemens, and Panasonic and offers access through a paid membership platform (CourtListener opinion, 2024). The asserted patents concern video compression/encoding (H.264/CAVLC), adaptive playback, secure real-time transmission, and object detection in video. The suit has been reported as resolved between Meta and VideoLabs (Law360, Oct. 2025). WhatsApp's single appearance reflects its role as a co-defendant subsidiary rather than an independent litigant.
VideoLabs asserted five patents, including U.S. Patent No. 7,970,059, against Meta and related subsidiaries. Law360 reported in October 2025 that Meta and VideoLabs resolved the dispute.
Related action by BlackBerry against Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, consolidated for pretrial purposes with BlackBerry v. Snap. The narrative lists Federal Circuit appeal 2020-1256 as arising from this consolidated action. The narrative does not fully identify the patents asserted in this case.
BlackBerry sued Facebook and affiliated entities for patent infringement; U.S. 9,349,120 was among the asserted patents. The court found the '120 claims not drawn to an abstract idea, but final disposition as to the '120 Patent was not confirmed.