Some research on investing in simplex wefunder (POV ROI)
Can simplex the company every reach $40m?
**Scale gap:** WhatsApp has roughly 3 billion monthly active users. SimpleX Chat has 430,000+. That's about a 7,000x difference.
**WhatsApp's money (Meta doesn't break it out cleanly, but recent figures):**
- WhatsApp's paid business messaging crossed $2 billion in annualized revenue by Q4 2025 [WizMessage](
https://wizmessage.com/blog/whatsapp-business-statistics) , with Meta's Family of Apps "other revenue" reaching $801 million in Q4 2025 alone [WizMessage](
https://wizmessage.com/blog/whatsapp-business-statistics)
- Separately, Click-to-WhatsApp ads generated an estimated $12 billion in 2025 [Revenue Memo](
https://www.revenuememo.com/p/how-does-whatsapp-make-money) , though that's counted as Meta's ad revenue, not WhatsApp's own line
- Analysts project business messaging could grow to over $8 billion annually by 2030 [Revenue Memo](
https://www.revenuememo.com/p/how-does-whatsapp-make-money) if trends hold โ which would still be a fraction of Meta's overall revenue
**On the "how likely" question** โ I can't predict this with any confidence, but here's context to weigh it against, not a recommendation either way:
- SimpleX's own numbers are telling: they estimate 10,000 paid names at ~$50/year would generate $500K โ just barely covering their current $360K/year operating cost. That's the *modest-success* case for one revenue line, not a breakout one.
- All three planned revenue streams (public names, business messaging, paid servers) are pre-launch or proof-of-concept stage โ none are generating real revenue today.
- Comparable privacy-messaging projects: Signal is still donation-funded after a decade and hasn't solved monetization. Telegram took roughly ten years and hundreds of millions of users before Premium subscriptions became meaningful.
- More broadly, most Reg CF/SAFE community-round investments never reach a liquidity event (acquisition or IPO) that lets the SAFE convert into anything โ that's a structural risk of this investment category, not specific to SimpleX.
- On the positive side: the growth is genuinely organic (no paid marketing), the privacy thesis is hard for incumbents to copy for the reasons the pitch lays out, and the round has drawn credible backers like Jack Dorsey and Asymmetric Capital Partners.