Internet phone company Jangl to sell assets, core team goes to competitor Jajah

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Jangl, the Internet phone company we reported about earlier this week as being in talks to sell, is essentially being closed down and its assets sold off. It is still looking for a buyer; a deal close to being signed last week has fallen through.

I just got off the phone with Michael Cerda, who was Jangl’s chief executive until he resigned on Monday. Cerda said he and his co-founder Ben Dean have joined competitor Jajah, where they will round out that company’s management team.

“We wanted to build a company here, and that’s not what is happening,” Cerda said, explaining his decision to leave to Jangl. The two founders are taking five other developers with them to Jajah. Cerda will be running business development and sales at Jajah, and Dean will help build a Silicon Valley engineering team (Jajah’s technology team so far has been based in Israel).

He said his goal is to keep the team intact, and to use its expertise to add value to what Jajah is doing and to see his team’s vision through to the next level.

He said Jangl has a skeletal crew remaining that will stay on to try to sell the company. He said there may be a strategic investor interested. Aside from its intellectual property and signed partners, Jangl still has revenue coming in, he said. It gets money from its premium calling service on dating sites and also from advertising, especially on its SMS offering.

He said the majority of Jangl’s investors wanted Jangl to proceed to a sale, even though he thought it was premature to do so. Jangl really needed 18 to 24 more months to reach its full potential, he said.

Cerda will be writing up a summary of his Jangl saga shortly, and I’ll update with a link.

Update: Here’s Cerda’ blog.

Update 2: Another VoIP company, TalkPlus, may soon be exiting the business, according to GigaOM. The company’s chief executive, Michael Toepel, recently left the company after it failed to secure a new investment. We previously covered TalkPlus last year and back in 2006 after it raised a $5.5 million first round from Menlo Ventures.