Facebook has acquired mobile app Beluga and its team. TechCrunch shares the following statement from Facebook:

We’re psyched to confirm that we’ve just acquired the talent and assets of Beluga, whose simple and elegant mobile apps blew us away as a solution to help groups of friends stay in touch on the move. We’re looking forward to welcoming co-founders Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow, and we’re excited that the team will continue their vision for groups and mobile communication as part of Facebook.

Essentially, Beluga is a group mobile chat app. Louis Gray has a good write-up of it here. Beluga posted the following to its own site:

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired Beluga!

For now, Beluga will continue to function as it does today. Your Beluga account and data will not be lost. We’ll be providing more details on future plans for Beluga in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Interestingly, Om Malik wrote about Beluga earlier this month (an article, which Beluga itself retweeted), as an example of how Google could beat Facebook. "Ability to interact on an ongoing basis anywhere, any time and sharing everything, from moments to emotions – is what social is all about. From my vantage point, this is what Google should focus on. If not — you know it very well — Facebook will," he wrote. 

Good call. 

By the way, Beluga is run by three people, and they all used to work for Google. Meanwhile, Google users are still awaiting that "social layer" they’ve been talking about for months. 

Financial details of Facebook’s Beluga acquisition are unknown.