It seems venture capitalists smell blood in the water when it comes to Skype, and now they are pooling their resources to go in for the kill.

In September 2005, the auction powerhouse known as eBay purchased Skype for $2.5 billion.  At the time the acquisition didn’t seem to make much sense to people, but eBay promised that the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service would be integrated into auctions to ease communications between buyers and sellers.  While some of that did indeed happen, it never reached critical mass on the site.

Recently eBay has been hinting that it was looking to sell off the service, but at the same time it was also looking to make an initial public offering (IPO) of a common stock of the service.  Rumors of the IPO seemed to really get the purchase rumors flowing, with even the people who sold Skype to eBay discussing buying it back.

While all has been quiet for the past few months, rumors of a buyout are heating up again as TechCrunch is reporting that multiple venture capital firms are looking into pooling their resources to purchase the VoIP service for $2 billion or more.  Marc Andreessen’s new Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm is the only named group currently attached to the deal, and there is no word if Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who were involved in the April talks are involved in the current negotiations.

Apparently eBay wants to sell off the service because it distracts from its core ecommerce business, and the auction did something similar recently selling StumbleUpon back to its founder.

All of this may be somewhat tainted as Skype is still involved with some legal issues over possible patent infrigement in its core technology.  This may be part of the reason a $2 billion price tag is being discussed when eBay paid $2.5 billion originally for the service.  Skype made $551 million dollars last year with a projection of $1 billion a year by 2011, so a $2 billion price tag almost feels like a fire sale.

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Entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 2:48 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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