Stephen Silver
What Dropbox plans to do with the $648 million it will generate in the initial public offering isn't yet clear.
Bloomberg reported the details of the Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday morning. The file sharing company, which produces various apps utilized by iOS and other Apple platforms while also competing with iCloud, will offer 36 million shares of Class A common stock for $16 to $18.
That IPO would put Dropbox's valuation, at the high end, in the $7.1 billion to $7.6 billion range. The company was valued at $10 billion during its funding round four years ago. Dropbox will be listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
In a separate transaction, announced Friday, Dropbox said that it has formed a "strategic partnership" with enterprise solutions provider Salesforce, which will include both product integration and a $100 million sale of stock to Salesforce's venture capital arm Salesforce Ventures. The venture arm had been an investor in Dropbox since 2014.
Dropbox was founded in San Francisco in 2007. It currently claims 500 million registered users, 11 million of whom pay for the service.
Famously, Dropbox turned down a pitch from Steve Jobs in 2009, and also rejected a nine-figure buyout from Apple a bit later in the year. More recently, in August 2017, Dropbox joined Apple and several other top tech firms in a Supreme Court brief expressing concern about warrantless location tracking.
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11 Comments
Stevo should've bought DropBox for $3 billion when he had a chance.
It would've solved a lot of iCloud problems for Apple. :)
I know, hindsight....
The whole creative industry is using Dropbox.
Apple should have bought or buy it ASAP.
With future fiber optic high speed Internet Dropbox would work more and more like our to go hard drive.
With less needed space on our computers.
The one failing of Dropbox is when someone invites me to "share" their folder, their stuff then uses up my storage allowance. (I'm cheap and just have the free version). If all they are trying to do is transfer files, I have to tell them just to send a link, not to share.
I prefer the way Box.com works, where if a folder is shared by someone, you basically get a link to the owners folder, where it then just shows up as a shared folder on your list of folders.
Only 2% of users are paying for the service and you think Apple should’ve bought the business at $3B? I like Dropbox and I’m one of the 2%, but $3B pays for a lot of iCloud development. I’m interested in how they turn it into an ongoing business. Will they use the IPO money for acquisitions that move them beyond storage?
They're probably gonna give out $648 Million worth of bonuses.....