Dropbox Becomes Fastest SaaS Firm To Hit $1 Billion Milestone

Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston today revealed that the company has hit new revenue milestones thanks to its hybrid, self-serving business strategy.

Speaking at a press event in San Francisco today, Houston said: “Today I’m really proud to announce that Dropbox has crossed $1 billion in revenue run rate and I’m even prouder to share that IDC has confirmed that Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company in history to reach that milestone”.

IDC analyst Robert Mahowald confirmed the news, saying: “no SaaS company to date has been able to cross that threshold faster than Dropbox”.

The event was also used to announce updates to its Smart Sync and Paper products, providing ‘unlimited storage’ and enhanced workplace collaboration respectively.

Big bucks

The Software-as-a-Service firm now boasts 500 million global users, as well as 200,000 paying business customers – which has risen from around 150,000 in March 2016 – after a push to gain a stronger foothold in the enterprise market.

“More recently, Dropbox has taken off in the enterprise”, Houston said. “We started by selling to individuals with Dropbox Pro, then to companies with Dropbox Business and over the last few years we’ve been working with CEOs around the world to build enterprise grade security, control and visibility into our products”.

And this hybrid-esque approach has apparently been a key factor: “When you take the viral growth, scale, user love, these are hallmarks of a consumer internet company and combine them with a strong business model and recurring revenue – the hallmarks of a SaaS company – what you get is an incredibly powerful model.

“It’s really efficient; the vast majority of our revenue is self-serving and last year we shared that Dropbox turned free cash flow positive which means we’re funded by our customers, not our investors. And all this is working at a scale that few companies have achieved”.

This is undoubtedly good news for Dropbox, coming amidst rumours of a possible IPO, although Houston stressed that the company is in no rush to make this happen.

Dropbox recently received certification for the new EU-US Privacy Shied data transfer agreement, before finding itself in the news for the wrong reasons after it was found to be storing deleted files and data belonging to some of its customers.

Quiz: The Cloud in 2016!