Several investors are considering making a bid on Skype, the voice-over-IP service owned by eBay.  eBay bought out Skype for about $4.1 billion in September 2005 but failed to find a real way to integrate the service into their system.

Some of the investors considering making a bid includes Andreesen Horowitz and Index Ventures.  Index Ventures was one of the early investors in Skype.  There is also rumored to be another multi-billion dollar private equity company involved according to TechCrunch.

At one point eBay was considering having Skype have their own IPO.  It is unclear whether the current Skype CEO Josh Silverman will still be involved if an acquisition does take place.  While Silverman was running Skype, the company grew to $551 million in revenue this year.  By 2011, eBay expects Skype to hit about $1 billion in revenues.

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis both started Skype together shortly after KaZaa.  If Skype gets acquired, then the private equity companies and investors would probably work towards an IPO.

Despite an offer that KKR, Warburg, Providence, Elevation Partners, and the original founders of Skype proposed, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) decided to keep the VoIP company they acquired for $2.6 billion about four years ago.  Instead eBay will spin off Skype as its own company in 2010 and will file it to go public.

“Skype is a great stand-alone business with strong fundamentals and accelerating momentum,” stated eBay President and CEO, John Donahoe. “But it’s clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal. We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path for maximizing its potential. This will give Skype the focus and resources required to continue its growth and effectively compete in online voice and video communications. In addition, separating Skype will allow eBay to focus entirely on our two core growth engines—e-commerce and online payments—and deliver long-term value to our stockholders.”

Below are some of Skype’s stats:
- 2008 revenue: $551 million, 2007 revenue: roughly $382 million
- Number of Skype users: 405 million by the end of 2008
- 2011 expected revenue: $1 billion
- Josh Silverman will now be the head of Skype.

Recently Skype created an iPhone application and millions of people were downloading it as soon as it came out.  Over 1 million people downloaded it within the first 36 hours.

[via eBay press release]