Founders Looking to Buy Back Skype VoIP Service?

Three and a half years ago, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion; now, reports are surfacing that Skype's founders might be looking to buy it back.

About three and a half years ago, online auction giant eBay bought VoIP success story Skype for some $2.6 billion dollars, and espoused dreams of integrating Skype functionality into its ecommerce business so, say, buyers could call up sellers and get details on items before placing a bid, or maybe the company would hold online real-time voice auctions. To hear eBay talk, the possibilities for synergy were endless.

Except…for the most part, those synergies never happened, and eBay eventually admitted it overvalued Skype, although Skype continued to grow and attract users to its free device-to-device VoIP service (and paid-for ability to connect to landline and mobile phones). Skype earned about $550 million during 2008, but current ebay CEO John Donahoe has said the Skype and eBay have no fundamental reasons to be part of the same company…comments which many industry watchers have interpreted as a willingness to sell.

Now, reports are circulating that that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been approaching private equity firms about assembling financing to make a bid to buy back Skype from eBay. Although reports do not indicate whether direct negotiations are underway, the New York Times has reported that Zennstrom and Friis were looking for put together $1 billion in financing for a deal somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion.

Since selling Skype, Zennstrom and Friis have been involved in the online television and video service Joost, which recently ditched its customer client software and switched to a Flash-based in-browser format, and has faced serious competition from the likes of the Apple iTunes store as well as Hulu and broadcaster’s own sites.