one report last week forecasting today’s news, a figure not disputed when I asked CEO and co-founder Brad Birnbaum about it earlier today. “Kustomer strongly believes spinning out was in the best interest of the company, customers and employees,” he said, “and we are very excited to continue to enhance our world-class platform in ways we couldn’t have imagined only a few years ago using advanced automations and generative AI. \nThis fit well with Facebook’s (and eventually Meta’s) vision of how it saw platforms like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp developing: people and businesses were already using these to communicate informally, so the thinking was to build enterprise-grade products to formalize, monetize and enhance that activity