Jan Koum of WhatsApp will be joining Facebook’s board of directors. His new position is part of the $16 billion acquisition of Facebook on the company he started. The former Yahoo alum Crunchbase’s profile indicated that he added his new position as Board Member of the social network giant Thursday.

Facebook is purchasing the 450 million user-strong mobile app for $16 billion, $12 billion worth of Facebook stock and $4 billion in cash. Founders of WhatsApp will be eligible for another $3 billion in stock grants, which will be paid if they remain employees of Facebook for four years, CNN Money reported.

This multibillion dollar acquisition of the fiver-year old WhatsApp would seemingly makes Jan Koum the newest Internet billionaire today.

According to CrunchBase, Jan dropped out of San Jose University, where he was studying math and computer science. He was also formerly with Yahoo for nine years, where he started at the company’s Security and Operations Engineering and move on to Infrastructure Engineering. Jan’s LinkedIn profile shows his title at WhatsApp as Senior Tweet Manager.

CNN Money notes that WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app for smartphones, according to OnDevice Research.

“WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Android and Nokia,” as described on the company’s website.

The company tweeted that on December 31st, users sent 18B messages and received 36B, which totals to 54 billion messages in one day.

Jan Koum founded WhatsApp with Brian Acton in 2009. Forbes estimates that Koum held a 45% share in the company, while Acton’s stake was more than 20%.