WhatsApp founder Jan Koum donates $200m to Shaare Zedek

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum has donated $200 million to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. He made his wealth from the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook and since then has become one of the biggest philanthropists supporting Jewish causes. Following his gift, the hospital has been renamed the Koum Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

“It was very important for us to add to the name and not change it completely, out of respect for the founders of the hospital 125 years ago,” says hospital CEO Prof. Jonathan Halevy.

Koum has not met personally with representatives of the hospital but says that the connection between his family foundation and the hospital was established a decade ago.

“The management of Koum Family Foundation, headed by a relative Jana Kalika, convened a number of hospitals at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to present them with possible projects. We then received a donation of $15 million, on the basis of which our Yakum building was built, for pediatrics, which we can now reveal is actually a building named after Jan Koum,” Halevy recounts.

Since then, the Koum Family Foundation donated another $10 million to the hospital. Halevy notes that over the years Koum has probably donated millions of dollars to other hospitals as well as academia. One of his best-known donations is to the nanotechnology building at Tel Aviv University. In Israel, he has also donated amounts ranging from hundreds of thousands to several million dollars to Ir David, the Maccabi Task Force fighting BDS, and to AIPAC. He has also donated to academia in the US, including Fordham and Stanford universities.

The latest $200 million donation will be used to build a new hospital tower, which will consolidate Shaare Zedek’s status as the largest hospital in Jerusalem. “No one can take away from Hadassah that it has been the most important center of university medicine in Jerusalem,” says Halevy. “But yes, we are big today in every parameter.”

Halevy believes that the decision to donate specifically to Shaare Zedek was not influenced by the values of the hospital, which is a religious hospital. “People donate to people. The donation is based on the relationship that has been created over the years between our management and the foundation.”

Koum doesn’t like being called an entrepreneur

Koum is an unusual billionaire and philanthropist. He doesn’t like being called an “entrepreneur,” saying, “Entrepreneurs are people who like to make money, I like to make products that help people.” In one of his only media appearances, Koum attended the DLD conference in Munich and said that he decided not to have ads on WhatsApp because he grew up in Soviet Ukraine, a world without ads. “It just didn’t seem right to me to push ads into people’s conversations.”

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After Facebook acquired WhatsApp, he stayed on at Facebook for several years but reportedly left over a privacy dispute, an issue he previously said was important to him, having grown up in a country that routinely violated its citizens’ privacy.

Koum was born in 1976 in Kiev, Ukraine, and immigrated to the US with his mother at the age of 16. His father remained in Ukraine and was supposed to join the family, but the reunion never happened, and in 1997 the father died of cancer. Koum and his mother supported themselves through blue-collar jobs.

Koum studied programming, dropped out to work as an engineer at Yahoo!, and joined a computer think tank where he met the founders of Napster. He left Yahoo!, he left to travel around the world, applying for a job at Facebook but was rejected.

In 2009, shortly after the birth of Apple’s App Store and the smartphone revolution, Koum cofounded WhatsApp, and the app, which became particularly popular among Russian speakers in Silicon Valley, and later among the general public (although in the US it has never achieved the popularity it has in Israel).

WhatsApp, was sold to Facebook (now Meta) in 2014 for $19.3 billion. Koum’s wealth was estimated at $15.2 billion in 2023 by Forbes, ranking him 44th on the magazine’s list of the richest people in the US.

Since then, Koum has become a philanthropist, mainly for Jewish causes, and since 2022 he has donated significant amounts to Jewish organizations so that they could provide aid to Ukraine after the war with Russia broke out.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on May 10, 2026.

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