• Paid Content, Monday, March 22, 2010 5:01 PM

Don't look now, but the founders of Skype have raised $165 million to nurture the next crop of "disruptive" technology startups.

Atomico Ventures, the London-based group that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis hatched back in 2006 now plans to refocus on early-stage software and Web companies, so long as they're potentially "transformative," writes The Financial Times.

"The type of companies we are looking at are consumer-facing and also small business ... that do not need to build up sales forces around the world to scale and grow," Zennstrom tells the paper. "These are the kinds of companies like Skype, Google, and Facebook who, if the business model is really working, they can get large revenues without having to go through too many financing rounds."

Duh, says The Business Insider, which calls Atomico's fondness for would-be Google's and Facebook's, "kind of a no brainer."

Still, "What makes the fund remarkable," notes TMCNet.com, "is that Atomico managed to raise so much for its second fund." Indeed, as the FT.com noted, a number of venture capital groups are having a hard time finding investors lately.

Similarly, as the The Business Leader Network blog writes: "This is one of the few funds to close in 2010, (Sofinnova and Aster both closed funds in January February) -- It also demonstrates the challenging fund raising environment at present."

As Paid Content notes, Zennstrom and Friis -- who also started Kazaa and Joost -- had initially sought to raise $266 million, "but downplay the shortfall telling the Financial Times, 'when we started we had a flexible number' and 'we think we have exactly the right amount of money.'"

Read the whole story at Paid Content »