Instagram is owned by Meta (the United States, NASDAQ: META), which acquired the brand on 6 September 2012 for $1 billion.[1][2] Instagram was founded in 2010 in San Francisco, California and was independent until 2012.
Evidence: Meta Platforms, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K filed 2026-01-29, SEC EDGAR, 29 January 2026. Verified from filings; last checked .
Instagram had thirteen employees and no revenue when Facebook bought it in 2012 for about $1 billion, a price then considered extraordinary. It is now a substantial share of the group's advertising income, and the purchase was central to the antitrust case brought against the company.
Sentences about Instagram from Meta's latest annual filing[1], copied word for word.
Instagram brings people closer to the people and things they love.
Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, Live, and messaging are places where people and creators can connect and express themselves through photos, video, and private messaging, and discover and shop from their favorite businesses.
A plain count of the times the name appears in the text of each annual report, not counting the start of a sentence. A brand that an owner writes about more is usually one it treats as central. The brand is named less often than it was three years earlier.
Controlling ownership as of . Brands grouped under the entity that owns them; large groups are collapsed.
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Meta controls 6 brands on Brandtree, 6 of them in internet & digital.
Meta has more brands in social networks on Brandtree than any other owner: 3 of 19.
Meta is a publicly listed company headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States, founded in 2004. Brandtree records 6 brands under its control, and it is listed as NASDAQ: META.
Meta was called Facebook until 2021, when it renamed itself after the virtual worlds it was then betting on. It owns four of the most used communication services in the world, and American regulators spent years arguing in court that two of those were bought specifically to remove competitors.
Brandtree records a controlling owner for 2,550 brands that began in the United States. 479 of them (19%) are now controlled by a company headquartered in another country; Instagram is not one of them.
Facebook acquired Instagram, then a thirteen-person company with no revenue, for about $1 billion in cash and stock. The final consideration fell as Facebook shares declined between announcement and closing.
The Office of Fair Trading, whose case records the Competition and Markets Authority now holds, cleared Facebook's acquisition of Instagram unconditionally in August 2012. Competition authorities later came to regard purchases of this kind very differently, and the same transaction became central to the antitrust case brought against the company in the United States.
The parent company of Instagram is Meta, a publicly listed company headquartered in the United States.
Yes. Instagram originated in the United States in 2010 and its owner, Meta, is also headquartered in the United States.
Meta completed its acquisition of Instagram on 6 September 2012, after announcing the deal on 9 April 2012. The deal was valued at $1 billion.
Instagram was an independent company from its founding in 2010 in San Francisco, California until Meta acquired it in 2012.
Yes. As of 9 October 2026, Instagram is still owned by Meta. The ownership record was last checked against primary sources on that date.
Last verified . Every ownership fact above is backed by one of these primary documents. Numbers in brackets in the text refer to this list.
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