Facebook surprised us all earlier this month when they acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion—Americans were especially shocked since most of us hadn't previously heard of WhatsApp. Even though the app isn't popular in the US, it has 90 million users worldwide, mostly in India, Brazil, and Mexico. But you wouldn't be alone in thinking that $19 billion still seems like an awfully hefty price to pay for an app.

In reality, the WhatsApp acquisition is the largest ever for a venture-backed company. Other heavy hitters include Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion and Yahoo's purchase of Broadcast.com for $5.04 billion.

To give those acquisitions a little context, Simply Business has created the interactive visualization below, which will walk you through tech giants' acquisitions over the last 15 years. Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook have all aggressively acquired loads of smaller companies over the years.

The visualization marks each acquisition with a bubble—the larger the bubble, the larger the acquisition. You can filter results by cost, frequency, industry, and company. You might be surprised by what you find—Nest, maker of smart smoke alarms, was acquired for $3.2 billion, while Instagram was bought for just $1 billion.


Click image to see the interactive version (via Simply Business).

Author Bio 
Rob Toledo is a Seattleite who matches the usual stereotypes. Loves coffee, the rain, and prefers dogs to cats. When not rambling about marketing and web design, he can be found in the mountains either climbing or hiking.