The Koum Family Foundation has made a $200 million gift to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, one of the largest donations ever to an Israeli institution.
Based in Palo Alto, the foundation carries out the philanthropic work of Jan Koum, the Ukraine-born Jewish billionaire and WhatsApp co-founder. Koum is a major donor to Jewish causes, both in the Bay Area and across the world.
The 124-year-old hospital will be renamed the Koum Shaare Zedek Medical Center in recognition of the donation.
Shaare Zedek has around 1,000 beds, making it one of the largest hospitals in the country. The gift will go toward a major expansion. A new 24-story hospital building will be the “largest and most advanced facility of its type anywhere in Israel,” with 1.5 million square feet designed with the structural integrity to handle “developing regional threats,” according to a press release.
“This gift reflects our confidence in a future of medical innovation and research that will benefit patients in Israel and around the world,” Koum said in a statement this week.
Koum is a co-founder of popular messaging service WhatsApp, which was sold in 2014 to Facebook for $19 billion. At the time, Forbes estimated that Koum owned 45% of WhatsApp, making him, after the sale, one of the world’s richest people.
Koum grew up in a village near Kyiv and immigrated to the United States in the 1990s as a teen, part of the exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the aftermath of its collapse. He eventually landed in Mountain View and founded WhatsApp in 2009.
Koum’s foundation has become a major player in Bay Area and national Jewish philanthropy in recent years. During Covid, an initiative led by Taube Philanthropies and the Koum Family Foundation directed $10 million in emergency funding to six Bay Area JCCs. In 2025, the Koum Foundation donated an undisclosed “major”” amount to make Stanford University’s Israel studies pilot program a permanent one. He was behind the $3.5 million Menorah Center in S.F. for the Russian-speaking Jewish Community of SF Bay Area.
The Koum Family Foundation is also a major supporter of J.
Nationally, he’s given to AIPAC, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Israel on Campus Coalition and the Maccabee Task Force Foundation. He has also given tens of millions of dollars to Jewish organizations now involved in relief efforts for Ukrainian refugees in Eastern Europe.
Koum’s donation bumps just past Anat and Shmuel Harlap’s gift to Clalit’s Beilinson Hospital of $180 million, according to Israeli media site Ynet.