New Funding Values Dropbox At £6.1bn

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has closed a $250 million round of funding, valuing the company at $10 billion (£6.1 billion).

The company’s latest investment was led by BlackRock and brings the total amount poured into the company over the £500 million mark. Founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox is now one of the most valuable companies in Silicon Valley, and is likely to go public on the stock market very soon to attract even more investors.

The majority of Dropbox’s 200 million customers pay nothing to use the service, which can be installed for free onto mobile and PC devices, however individual users can pay a fee of $10 a month to increase the storage available to them, with businesses paying $795 per year for five users and $125 per additional user per year.

Going into business

The company is now looking to explicitly target the enterprise space, with CEO Drew Houston unveiling the new Dropbox For Business in November 2013. This new service provides several perks for business users, including advanced protection controls, sharing audit logs to track which employees access what files, the ability to transfer and remote wipe files, and the ability to access both work and personal files (via separate tabs) in one linked account.

Dropbox first announced that it was seeking funding to continue its push into the enterprise space last November. At that time, the company valued itself at around $8 billion, meaning it has enjoyed a sharp period of growth in the last two months. The company’s valuation had doubled since its last round of funding in 2011, when investors including Goldman Sachs valued the San Francisco-based company at $4bn. In comparison, Box, a direct Dropbox competitor, had a valuation of $2bn when it raised $100m late last year, according to market reports.

The valuation anticipates significant growth as Dropbox’s 2012 turnover stands at an estimated $110m. The company expanded from 200 to 500 employees over the course of 2013, and the new investment could well go towards recruiting new talent or building new offices.

The news of this investment comes a week after a major outage during a routine server upgrade brought down the entire service, meaning users were unable to access their files for several hours as the company attempted to fix a software bug.

Dropbox is yet to comment on the investment.

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