GigaOM

Open Communication Systems, the company behind conferencing & group communications service, Radio Handi has been acquired by Virtual PBX, a ten year old provider of hosted PBX service for businesses.

While Radio Handi does clever things like easily broadcast audio on the net, it is conference call part of the business that has been the driving this bootstrapped start-up based in San Francisco. The company had raised a total of $225,000, with a big chunk of it coming from founder Brian McConnell.

When we asked him why sellout now, before getting the company to the next level, he said that telecom is a capital intensive business, and the track record for telecom start-ups hasn’t been that stellar.

“When we surveyed the previous ten year history for telecom startups, we saw that relatively few small to mid-size companies were successful VC investments,” he says. “Many of them are/were successful companies, but very few generated the kind of returns that make a VC backed deal attractive to founders. Deals like Skype are very rare in the business.”