Founders looking to buy back Skype from eBay

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the creators of Skype who sold the system to eBay for $2.6bn in 2005, are reportedly getting ready to try and buy their invention back.

A report in The New York Times claims that the pair are pulling together a private equity deal. Zennström and Friis used their money from the buyout to set up a venture capital firm and were early investors in video sharing site Joost.

The report states that the pair are looking to raise around $1bn in private equity funding and are looking for eBay to co-fund the rest of he deal with a seller's note.

EBay has been looking for a buyer for some time, as John Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, has repeatedly stated. The company admitted that it overpaid for Skype when it wrote off $1.4bn from the sale, and has had problems integrating it into eBay's activities.

Skype is profitable, but the company has not found a way to monetise its services into large amounts of revenue. Analysts estimate that the company has about eight per cent of global telephony traffic.

However, it is possible that Skype may be about to increase its footprint even further. The Skype application for the iPhone has proved highly popular and a similar application is being prepared for the BlackBerry.