The reports from a few days ago that the Jajah deal with O2 closed at $200 million were correct. Telefónica Europe (aka O2) just announced that it bought Jajah for 145 million Euros ($207 million) in an all-cash deal.
Jajah, which provides Internet calling services and thus competes with Skype, was on the block since at least November (which TechCrunch was first to report on), following Google’s purchase of much-smaller Gizmo5.
Jajah has 15 million subscribers and has served up more than 1 billion VoIP calls.
Jajah will continue to operate under its own brand. The sale was not a happy affair for everyone involved, however. The deal was largely driven by Jajah’s investors, particularly Sequoia. We hear CTO Amichay Oren has left the company because he and his engineering team in Israel didn’t get treated the same as their counterparts in the U.S. In these types of deals, not everyone ends up winning. Jajah turned out not to be the next $1 billion company in Sequoia’s portfolio.
Given the fact that it raised $33 million in total capital, a $200 million exit is a decent outcome.
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