« Criston Software helps the IT admin guy | Main | Barcelona's Spri SGECR Venture Capital Invests In Spanish/American Music Recommendation Engine »
March 06, 2006
Sequoia makes second Euro investment with Jajah
With an investment of an undiscloased amount in Jajah, Sequoia makes its second Euro investment.
A VC we know well told us on Friday that he wasn’t sure at first what to make of Sequoia's recent dealmaking in Europe. That is because he remembers a partner at Sequoia telling him that if his fund ever invested in a European venture, it would be because he was dead.
First Fon, and now with this latest investment in Jajah, Sequoia has completed its second deal in Europe.
Austria is a pretty good place for a ski holiday. It's also where JaJah's founders hail from.
A press release was apparently sent to certain German publications in late February. According to Der Spiegel, it took Sequoia 20 days to close the deal after the first meeting with Jajah’s Austrian founders, Roman Scharf and Daniel Mattes, including moving the legal headquarters to Silicon Valley and Luxembourg (good location for low taxes on capital gains) and the transfer of the patents.
JaJah is a web-based VOIP service. The difference between what Skype and GoogleTalk offer, the calls are made using a standard phone. But one of the callers has to have a PC with web access to enter their own number and the one to be called. Jajah’s software calls back and then puts the call through. It is a bit like those old discount callback cards we once used. The calls are not free, but discounted. We noted that the the tarifs are not terribly cheap for calls between mobile phones, at least with the number we tested.
The a:c notes that several trade pubs have taken issue with Jajah's privacy policy as the contract the user agrees to seems to give the startup the right to track users movements on the web and third party address sharing.
There are a lot of variations on the VOIP theme these days. In Europe businesses and homes are buying IP telephony services from alternative telcos. The a:c euro, for example, has it and the setup is enabled for least cost routing. The prices are already pretty low. So for Jajah, or firms like it, to compete it would have to drive hard bargains with the telcos and minutes discounters, we believe.
Read -
Amerikanischer IT-Großinvestor steigt bei JAJAH ein
Read VOIP Startup Isn't Spyware, But It's Close PC Mag
Posted on March 6, 2006 12:45 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/606
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Sequoia makes second Euro investment with Jajah:
» Sequoia invests in Austria based Jajah from TJ's Weblog
As a:c reports Sequoia has discovered Europe as a new investment area: "A press release was apparently sent to certain German publications in late February. According to Der Spiegel, it took Sequoia 20 days to close the deal after... [Read More]
Tracked on March 10, 2006 07:49 PM
