O2 gobbles Jajah for $200 million

Update: Its confirmed, Jajah bought for $207 million

O2 won the bidding war to buy Jajah , the web based click to call VoIP startup. Earlier techcrunch had reported a bidding war to buy jajah , which included Microsoft and Cisco. Its surprising that O2 won the bidding war and not one of these other giants Microsoft/Cisco. It would have been a great fit for jajah to be with Microsoft/Cisco instead of an operator. I don’t know why an operator who already has its own network would buy a VoIP click to call startup.

Jajah was founded way back in 2005 and has been doing quite good. It has raised a total of $35 million dollars so far from the likes of Intel, Sequoia and Deutsche Telekom. According to sources, jajah serves over 25 million consumers and business callers in more than 122 countries. In addition, Yahoo messenger with 100 million users uses Jajah for Voice calls. Lately, the M&A activity are heating up including Google buying Gizmo. So it’s definitely a good news for lot of startups. I’m surprised why Google did not try to bid for Jajah. With Google getting into the Voice arena, jajah would have been a good fit. Microsoft’s bid for jajah was to bolster their enterprise UC offering. Google could have done the same thing with Google Wave/UC combo for enterprise. More later, Stay tuned!