The Federal Cartel Office is examining whether the planned takeover of the start-up Kustomer by the social media network falls within the scope of German merger control, it announced on Friday.

The New York-based company, founded in 2015, provides customer service platforms and chatbots that are supposed to be able to answer customer queries automatically.

“Should it turn out that the merger is subject to notification with us, we would request Facebook to submit the respective documents for examination immediately,” Federal Cartel Office president Andreas Mundt said, according to the statement.

Especially in the digital economy, many markets are already highly concentrated nowadays, he said. “Stringent merger control
is therefore indispensable,” Mundt stressed.

In 2017, a transaction value threshold was introduced into German competition law that allows for the examination of mergers in which companies or assets that generate little or no turnover are acquired for a purchase price of over 400 million euros (470 million dollars)

The high purchase price in such takeover cases is often a sign of innovative business ideas with great competitive market potential, according to the anti-cartel office’s statement.

Facebook had announced the purchase of Kustomer in November last year without giving details on the price or other financial conditions.

According to information from the Wall Street Journal at the time, Kustomer was valued at just over 1 billion dollars in the deal.