eBay completes sale of Skype

At long last, eBay has completed its sale of Skype. The deal, valued at $2.75 billion, sells a share to an investor group led by Silver Lake Investment group including Joltid Ltd. (the founders of Skype) and affiliates like Canada Pension Plan and Andreesen Horowitz. The deal gives the new investors 70 percent of the company while eBay will retain the remaining 30 percent.

The major win of the deal for Skype as a company is it now has full ownership of the Joltid peer-to-peer software that makes its core service possible. The deal settled a bunch of litigation that had the company tied up and it healed a rift between the service and its previous owners.

Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom originally sued eBay and the consortium of investors that were purchasing a 65 percent stake [1] in the VoIP calling company for copyright infringement over the use of the underlying technology in Skype, which was held by the Friis-Zennstrom entity, Joltid. The founders also filed an injunction against Mike Volpi and Index Ventures who were part of the consortium to block them from participating while derailing the purchase. Volpi allegedly had made-off with a computer containing Joltid source code. It seems like these legal maneuvers paid off for the founders after all. In the end, Volpi was removed from the investment group and the Skype founders joined it to finalize the deal.

For more:
- read this release [2]
- read this Skype blog post [3]

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