Skype founders offered stake amid legal row - Rumour

Mon Sep 7 2009, 16:52 PM

The founders of voice-over-IP (VoIP) service Skype may take a stake in the business alongside its new investors as part of plans to defuse the legal row over the core technology that runs the platform. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for USD2.6bn, are thought to be in negotiations with the new owners to allow them to invest directly in Skype.

eBay recently sold a 65% majority stake in the VoIP service to a consortium of investors, including private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. “Every company has a set of assets and liabilities and we understand the litigation is one of Skype’s liabilities,” says Mike Volpi, a partner at Index. “We are confident we can figure out a way around it.”

Although eBay owns Skype, it still leases its peer-to-peer (P2P) technology from Joltid, another of Friis and Zennstrom’s companies. Joltid is accusing eBay of breaching the firms' licensing deal and has threatened to take the technology from Skype, thereby disabling the service. eBay has sued Joltid to prevent this from happening, with the case set to heard in June.