I’m thrilled to announce that Zong has reached an agreement to be acquired by eBay (PayPal) — full announcement, and PayPal CEO Scott Thompson’s thoughts on the PayPal Blog.

Getting to what I like to call this “acceleration moment” didn’t happen on its own. This journey has always been about people. People make great products, and companies. Nothing else. Every battle we had to win, every challenge we had to overcome, every product we had to launch, carrier to connect, and client to win wasn’t the result of any individual, it was the result of an amazing, collegial team working days, nights, and weekends, and having fun in the process. Even in the toughest times, you, team, made it feel so much easier. We were one, a pack, bringing down obstacles standing in our way, one after the other. Now, it’s time to accelerate what we’ve built!

I am so excited by the unique combination of PayPal’s 8 million merchants, brand power, risk management expertise, and financial stability, with Zong’s Carrier DNA, its largest direct carrier payments network, product innovation, and best-in-class carrier billing technology. This industry first is going to allow us to scale what we’ve built over the course of the past 3 years (and then some) in a massive way!

I’d like to thank all of our merchant partners. Over 2 ½ years ago after chasing them for months, Facebook accepted to start testing mobile payments in the now defunct Gift Store. We then worked very closely with its amazing teams to build the ideal experience for Facebook Credits. This whole experience has been nothing short of amazing. Experiencing the rise of the biggest social network over the course of the past couple of years to over 700 million users has been phenomenal. For having seen it from the inside over a sustained period of time, I can now say that Facebook’s success has nothing to do with luck. It’s all about vision, sheer talent, energy, and culture. Other key partners along the way include amazing companies and leaders like IMVU, Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel), Big Fish Games, Sony Online Entertainment, Zynga, Playdom (now Disney), Bigpoint, and thousands of other amazing companies we have the privilege of serving. To all of you: thank you for trusting us at face value, when we were a tiny team in our cramped Spartan office. Stay tuned for a lot more innovation and scale, now that we’ve joined forces with PayPal. You won’t be disappointed with what we have in store for you!

To our 250 carrier partners around the world, thank you for letting us leverage your unique, and amazing capabilities to build a global mobile payments business. We’re all very excited at PayPal, and at Zong, to massively scale this business for you in the months to come.

Building a great company is also a factor of great investors. Starting with our early Angel Investors such as Eric Babecoff, and  later Ossama Hassanein from Newbury Ventures, who believed in us way back when in 2005 with Echovox. Frederic Court from Advent Venture Partners, who became our BD arm in Europe, sending us leads like a machine, and supporting us all along the way. Then finally when Zong was spun-off from Echovox, Dana Stalder from Matrix joined us, and was so instrumental in scaling our business, becoming my mentor, and guiding us in this amazing transformation that happened in the past 12-months.

I really can’t wait to join Scott Thompson’s team over at PayPal. The energy, passion, and drive of the team combined with PayPal’s unique scale and capabilities in payments convinced me this was the right way to accelerate what we’ve built. Most of e-commerce will shortly become m-commerce, and I genuinely believe that PayPal, hand-in-hand with wireless carriers around the world will win in a big way. We’ll be working very hard on things that will blow your mind. So stay tuned for a lot more mobile payment awesomeness!

—David Marcus (@davidmarcus)