Tributes pour in for Skype founder Toivo Annus who passed away at 48

Skype co-founder Toivo Annus has passed away on Sunday at the age of 48 due to an “unexpected illness.”

“I inform you with the utmost sadness that last weekend, on 12 July, our beloved husband, dad, entrepreneur, and investor Toivo Annus succumbed to an unexpected illness,” his wife was quoted as saying by local media reports. An intimate funeral service with family and close friends will be held.

Toivo Annus / Photo credit: Ambient Sound Investments

Annus was known for his work at Skype, where he had led the engineering team until ecommerce major eBay acquired the company in late 2005.

He then moved on to focus on his investment firm Ambient Sound Investments, which he established together with three other colleagues at Skype.

The Estonian entrepreneur was also an active investor in various tech projects. He’s one of the early backers and advisors of Southeast Asia’s tech scene, pouring in funding to Sea Group’s gaming business Garena in 2008. That was before funding had taken off in the region.

Other investments in his portfolio include RedMart, Red Dot Payment, Pomelo Fashion, Coda Payments, and VC fund Jungle Ventures, among others.

The tech community in the region remembers him as a “fearless investor” and a “brother.”

“Toivo was a fearless investor who was led by the courage of his convictions. He participated in every round we ever raised, making his mark by doing so even in 2015 when we were in the wilderness, and his support made the difference between Coda’s survival and failure,” Neil Davidson, executive chairman at Coda Payments, told Tech in Asia.

“We will remember him for his unwavering support of our dream, for everything that he taught us along the way, and for the example that he set, always conducting himself with humility and backing it with immense substance. We will miss him,” Paul Leishman, president at Coda Payments, added.

Bernard Leong, who is now head of machine learning and AI at Amazon Web Services ASEAN, tweeted: “I am saddened by this as he was an investor to my former startup and we corresponded on and off on perspectives on new companies even [as] I moved on from my startup.”

Eric Su, CEO of Philippine-based Exnetwork, recalled: “As one of the co-founders of Skype, he would tell me stories of how they did things roughly or messily in the early days. This would comfort me as there was a lot of mess made at the early days of Lifebit […] He would give me valuable advice like the time when I was confused where to take the company […] He said, ‘Do not fight the jungle, the jungle always wins.’ Well, today the jungle has won and taken away a wise lion.”

James Chan, CEO and co-founder of Ion Mobility, shared that his business relationship with Annus extended into a friendship between their families.

“His quiet demeanor underscored his work ethics and no-bullshit stance, regardless of whether it was in engaging with an entrepreneur or a fellow investor. Despite [our] being almost a generation apart (nine-year gap), I’ve always looked up to Toivo as the business-investor brother I never had,” Chan told Tech in Asia. “It took years for us to get close, and just like that, he’s no longer with us. Southeast Asia will mourn the loss of one of our own, one taken too soon from us.”