Skype founders, buyer of service reportedly reach deal
SAN FRANCISCO - The founders of Skype have agreed to join the investor group buying the Internet calling service from EBay Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype to EBay in 2005, will take a stake in the company along with a group led by private equity firm Silver Lake, said the people, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public. They also will drop lawsuits filed against Skype and the investor group in London, California, and Delaware, the people said.
The settlement ends a legal fight that spanned two continents and threatened to shut down Skype. The founders, who own the underlying software code to the service, had accused EBay of breaking a licensing deal and sued the investor group in September, claiming damages were growing by $75 million a day.
Index Ventures, which helped orchestrate the deal, will no longer be part of the investor group, the people said. Some minor details of the agreement were still being worked out, and it’s possible the announcement of the deal could still be delayed, the people said.
John Pluhowski, a spokesman for EBay, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Joltid Ltd., the company owned by Zennstrom and Friis. A representative for Index Ventures didn’t return a call seeking comment.
Based in San Jose, Calif., EBay rose 69 cents, or 3.1 percent, to $23.24 in Nasdaq stock market trading. The stock has gained 66 percent this year.
The fight for Skype has been building for more than a year. Soon after John Donahoe became EBay’s chief executive last year, he said he would evaluate whether Skype was a good fit for the company. In April, EBay revealed plans to hold an initial public offering for the phone service, saying it had little to do with the online retailer’s other businesses.
Around that time, the battle escalated over the software code that the founders licensed to Skype through Joltid. The pair had accused Skype of altering the code, and Skype sued them in a London court.
In September, an investor group led by Silver Lake agreed to buy Skype for about $2 billion. Zennstrom and Friis struck back, filing lawsuits in federal courts against the group.
Zennstrom and Friis had founded Skype in 2003.
