Jajah, a VoIP upstart and rival of eBay’s (EBAY) Skype unit, early this morning announced that Deutsche Telekom’s T-Online Venture Fund had invested in the company, joining the likes of Intel Capital (INTC) in a $20 million financing round. Jajah CEO Trevor Healy (a former executive of PayPal, also owned by eBay) says the investment is significant because it marks the first time a major incumbent phone company has invested in an independent VoIP carrier.

Unlike some of its peers, Jajah isn’t out to destroy the big phone companies. Indeed, Healy describes Jajah as “telco friendly” because its particular brand of VoIP establishes phone-to-phone connections via the Internet: Callers and recipients still need landlines or mobile phones to speak to each other. (In contrast, Skype got its start promoting free computer-to-computer calls.)

Healy tells the Browser that Jajah, founded in 2005, aims to leverage some of Deutsche Telekom’s infrastructure, such as its IP backbone, to help deliver its calls; he says the two companies eventually may jointly market some of Jajah’s services.

But his big hope is that Jajah and its deep-pocketed new investor also start to innovate together. For example, Healy thinks the next wave for VoIP involves taking advantage of “presence” - the idea that the network knows where you are, and can route calls accordingly.

Says Healy: “If you’re at your office, your laptop may ring, but when you’re in your car, your mobile should ring, and when your home, your PSTN (public switched telephone network) phone will ring.” No wonder Deutsche Telekom likes these guys so much: in two out of the three cases in Healy’s example, the user is connecting over an “old world” solution.

Some of Healy’s ideas may seem a bit more radical, at least to an established company like DT. He talks about perhaps offering consumers a discount to listen to ads while waiting for their calls to connect, noting that the IP nature of the connections would allow advertisers to cherry pick the exact customers they’d like to target. (His example: Virgin Atlantic Airways might want to advertise Boston-London flights only to Jajah customers making calls between London and Boston.)

Of course, Jajah’s other big investor, Intel Capital, is backing the potentially disruptive WiMax standard and Clearwire, the Craig McCaw founded company that uses WiMax to deliver broadband. Will Jajah continue its telco-friendly stance? Healy is diplomatic: “We don’t know who the winners will be. Jajah’s strategy is to connect to all the standards.”