DigitalBeat

Two weeks ago, a quiet Silicon Valley-based voice company named Sabse bought Jaxtr, a “voice-over-internet-protocol” startup that lets you make cheap calls anywhere using your computer instead of a phone. It wasn’t totally clear why. While formative web voice companies like Skype have gone on to make money, many others have struggled. In Jaxtr’s case, it had raised more than $20 million, gained some 10 million users, but wasn’t — apparantly — seeing the sort of traction and revenue it was hoping for. So I talked to Sabse chief executive Yogesh Patel, a serial entrepreneur with a background in the mobile industry, about why he made the purchase.

First, a little about Sabse. Patel describes it as a “telephony-as-a-service platform,” by which he means it offers a suite of audioconferencing services for telecommunications carriers around the world. It’s proving a good fit for emerging markets, he claims, where not everyone has access to a computer. It lets people talk across web voice connections, landlines or mobile phones, convert faxes to emails, and other voice communication services. BT’s Ribbit, for example, also offers telephony as a platform service. Patel praises Ribbit but says his company’s integration of various voice services — as well as local data centers and networks it has built in Asia — have helped it gain more customers in emerging markets. At this point, Sabse is almost profitable through revenue-sharing deals with carriers, like Malaysia’s TM, and is talking to dozens of potential clients around the world, Patel tells me.

Menlo Park, Cali.-based Jaxtr, meanwhile, provides a relatively simple service for making VoIP calls. Give Jaxtr your phone number, either on its home site or on one of its embeddable widgets, then call Jaxtr will give you a new number — call it, and you’ll get a prompt to call the destination number. It’s a more roundabout way of making calls versus just picking up the phone and dialing an international number, but it’s free or very cheap to do. Patel sees Jaxtr as Sabse’s path to get more direct to consumer business. He’ll use it to upsell users into Sabse’s audioconferencing services, and he’s planning to run voice ads within Jaxtr (it doesn’t currently). As Jaxtr has a US userbase, Sabse will hope to get these people using its other services as well.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Sabse’s funding is undisclosed, but comes from its founders, including Patel as well as Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia.

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Tags: co:Jaxtr, co:sabse