In earlier posts here and here i spoke about skype, not its vonages ture, Vonage will close a $200 million round led by Bain Capital with participation from the company's management and previous investors 3i Group, New Enterprise Associates, Meritech Capital, and Institutional Venture Partners. That's the largest VC funding on record this year, according to researcher VentureOne. A source says Vonage is valued at approximately $1.1 billion after the financing.

Including the new round, Vonage has raised about $410 million since it was founded in 2001. Just nine months ago, it closed a $105 million round, much of which is still in the bank, says CFO John Rego. Why raise more? "Growth, growth, and more growth," Rego says.

Source: Deal FlowThis is one side of the story the other side i found this post by Om Malik on the VOIP market, titled "Real truth about VOIP sales", here are few excerpts:

• VoIP service revenues will grow from $1.3 billion in 2004 to $19.9 billion in 2009, Infonetics Research's latest report, VoIP Services annual market size and forecast for North America. That's less than 1% of the total Voice revenues in the US. So much for getting excited about VoIP in 2004. Now a few weeks ago, we had a report that said there are 1100 VoIP service providers world wide, of which about 500 are in the US. That means each one of those is doing about $2 million in sales. That's normalized for the entire group. back out the top three - Vonage, Cablevision and Time Warner, and factor in that of the total half of it came from Managed IP PBX services, well the residential market was much smaller than many though it was.
• Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst for Infonetics and author of the report points out that the forecast "also assumes that revenue growth is due to incremental revenue from add-on VoIP applications, such as conferencing, remote office integration, presence/location-based services, and collaboration."
• Some interesting highlights:
  
  • The number of residential/SOHO VoIP subscribers in North America is forecast to climb from 1.1 million in 2004 to 20.8 million in 2008
  • Managed IP PBX services, an earlier arrival than hosted offerings and aimed at medium and large organizations, make up just over half of the market in 2004
  • Business hosted VoIP service revenue will exceed that of managed IP PBX services by 2006, as thousands of small and medium businesses adopt hosted offerings.