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The startup's offering is comparable to other apps like GroupMe (which just got location and image sharing in a recent revamp) and textPlus.
In a statement on the Beluga website, we read that the startup's founders are "excited to continue to build our vision for mobile group messaging as part of the Facebook team. Beluga and Facebook are committed to create new and better ways to communicate and share group experiences."
Whether that means that Beluga will exist as its own entity, or as a separate Facebook feature, or even as supporting technology behind something much larger remains unknown. The founders did say that the service will continue to function "for now" and that user data won't be lost.