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Qumranet makes exit with $115m sale By Guy Griml Tags: Qumranet, Israel Giora Yaron, Benny Schnaider and Rami Tamir have done it again. The serial entrepreneurial trio are fattening their respective bank accounts by several million dollars more after the American open-source software giant and Linux operating system vendor Red Hat announced yesterday that it was purchasing the Israeli startup Qumranet for about $115 million. (The published price is $107 million, but that is not the real amount.) The selling price reflects a very nice return for Qumranet investors: The company was founded in 2005, and less than $20 million has been sunk into it since then. According to information obtained by TheMarker, Qumranet's founders and employees - there are a total of 60 - hold about 45% of the shares in the company. That means they'll be splitting about $52 million among themselves. Co-founder Yaron is chairman of the board and also one of the company's seed investors. Advertisement "Qumranet will be Red Hat's base in Israel," Schnaider explained in an interview to TheMarker. "We currently have about 50 employees in Israel and about 60 overall. We will become Red Hat Israel. All of the employees will remain, and no dismissals are expected." Tamir, meanwhile, explains that Red Hat is buying Qumranet because the technology developed by the Israeli company will broaden the U.S. firm's product line. "Virtualization - running software instead of hardware in order to cut hardware costs - is part of the Linux operating system," Schnaider says. "Today there are only two technology companies offering a solution that integrates virtualization into the operating system: Red Hat and Microsoft. Microsoft bases its software on a proprietary model. Red Hat does it with open-source code." Qumranet is a venture capital-backed company. Few companies that are backed by venture capital funds choose to deliver their products to the open-source community, but Qumranet did exactly that. Schnaider says that even though it wasn't easy to do things that way, it actually helped the company. "We realized that if we opened up to the open-source community, we would earn its support. What happened is that two months after we released our software it was integrated into Linux. The community gave our product an excellent reception. We're talking about developers from IBM, Intel, Novell, Google and Cisco. They helped us a lot," says Schnaider. Bookmark to del.icio.us   But you cannot hide Court rules Michigan resident helped liquidate Polish Jews during Holocaust. Junk TV Airing of first Palestinian soap opera was cancelled because topics were 'too liberal'.

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