The e-commerce firm has been funding both U.S. and Chinese tech companies, as a way to grow the company's global ecosystem, the source said.
In China, Alibaba's own bid to develop a messaging app has struggled to take off. Rival Tencent dominates the country's mobile messaging space.
So far, Alibaba hasn't generally integrated its services with the U.S. companies it has invested in. An exception was its funding of Quixey, a company that provides searches for mobile apps. The Chinese firm later tapped Quixey to provide app queries on the Alibaba-developed mobile OS.
Alibaba is perhaps best known for its massive IPO listing last year. The company ranks as one of China's biggest Internet firms, and runs the country's largest e-commerce sites in Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com.