Meta's big experiment in creating an enterprise-ready customer service platform has run its course: The parent of Facebook has formally spun out Kustomer, the CRM start-up it bought last year for roughly $1 billion.

The new entity is coming into life with a fresh injection of $60 million from previous backers Battery, Redpoint and boldstart, and a substantial cut into its prior valuation — it's now at $250 million, said one report last week forecasting today's news, a figure not contested when I asked CEO and co-founder Brad Birnbaum about it earlier today. Birnbaum will remain at the head of the spun-out company; Meta will retain a minority interest.

"Kustomer strongly believes spinning out was in the best interest of the company, customers and employees," he said, "and we are very excited to continue to enhance our world-class platform in ways we couldn't have imagined only a few years ago using advanced automations and generative AI."

Meta's plan to sell itself clear of Kustomer was first reported in March as part of a broader cost-cutting and restructuring effort at the company.

Meta's "year of efficiency" — the phrase used by CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — has also included some 21,000 layoffs; closing down several new app and content efforts (Move, NFT support and Cameo clone Super among them); and killing some of the other non-consumer bets the company had made over the years, such as its Connectivity infrastructure efforts.

Not clear if interested parties waited around for the chance to swoop up Kustomer, but holding on to a minority stake in the business means that Meta can keep a continued relationship with it in order to build out products, and to continue to service any clients that it had picked up during the year that Meta owned it.

All told, with new innovations everyone — including Meta — is chasing around generative AI, there is probably some pretty interesting stuff the two could build and integrate across Meta's platforms. At the same time, it's not totally clear how much business the two built together up to now.

While the Kustomer deal was first announced in November 2020, all regulatory clearances only came through early in 2022; when Facebook took the formal announcement of the deal's close on February 22, 2022, Facebook (soon to be renamed "Meta") had technically owned $1 billion Kustomer for little more than a year.

The idea behind Kustomer was a new approach at CRM based on the idea of "omni-channel" contact. As Birnbaum saw it, traditional CRMs simply did not cut it for the ways in which consumers-and any would-be customers of businesses-started interacting with companies.

Basic customer service lines and customer service desks are out; in come the variety of social media, websites, and messaging apps. So, Kustomer aimed to build a modern platform that would make this easier to manage and to use that data for better insights into consumer sentiment and to improve outgoing marketing communications alike.

That makes sense within the vision of how Facebook (and Meta, thereafter) thinks of platforms like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp: people and businesses are already communicating informally with those entities. Therefore the thought was to create enterprise-grade products to formalize, monetize, and enrich that activity.

And that might still be the case; only now it will be done as a standalone Kustomer company.