Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia’s Sabse has acquired Jaxtr, the ad supported VoIP startup. The amount paid by Bhatia hasn’t been disclosed but sources say that Bhatia just paid “Peanuts” to buy the troubled startup, Jaxtr. But still Jaxtr has till date received venture funding of about $21.5 million and its investors include the original 3 investors of Skype. Jaxtr was founded by Phillip Mobin and Touraj Parang in October 2005.
According to the deal Jaxtr will continue to work under its own brand name. The company can be a big beneficiary to Bhatia’s Sabse which was started in January 2008 and help Bhatia access and provide Sabse’s services to the huge number Jaxtr users.
Jaxtr, the Menlo Park,CA based start-up is reported to have 10 million users in 220 countries(2008). Jaxtr provides local Phone numbers in numerous countries around the world by contracting with wholesale Direct Inward Dialing (DID) exchanges. In 2008, Jaxtr launched FreeConnect allowing free calling to mobile phones worldwide.
Recently Jaxtr was having little problems and it laid of 13 employees in October. It now has a total of 30 employees. Soon after its high profile CEO Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn co-founder, stepped down or was fired.
Sabeer Bhatia got in the news when he sold the free e-mailing service , Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. He was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Draper Fisher Jurvertson in 1998 and was noted by TIME as one of the “People to Watch” in international business in 2002.
