CNBC Disruptor 50

Dropbox CEO talks of expanding into higher ed

Disruptor #6 Dropbox: Business segment growing
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Disruptor #6 Dropbox: Business segment growing

Dropbox is moving into the higher-education sector, building off Dropbox for Business, said the company's CEO and co-founder, Drew Houston, in an interview on Friday's edition of CNBC's "Squawk Alley."

The cloud-based document and file-sharing service, which is ranked No. 6 on CNBC's Disruptor 50 List, is creating partnerships with universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cal State Fullerton with students and faculty using the service, as indicated by the IT pages of those institutions.

"The way these relationships start is that [a] huge chunk of the student body is using Dropbox," said Houston during the "Squawk Alley" segment, which was taped on Thursday.

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Houston said that Dropbox for Business has been a quickly growing segment of the company.

"We've been opening up sales offices all over the world, building out the sales team, said Houston. "We doubled from 50,000 Dropbox customers last year to more than 100,000 now."

Dropbox has also teamed with up with large entities such as Microsoft. In November 2014, Microsoft announced a partnership with Dropbox in a press release, giving the users of both services the ability to sync, transfer and edit documents.

Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Houston said that Dropbox can offer companies such as Microsoft something they haven't made in house.

"Under the hood, there's a crazy amount of technical investment that we've made to be able to do things like store 50 billion documents, or support hundreds of millions of people saving a billion files every day," said Houston.

"These are huge infrastructure and technical challenges and a huge design challenge."

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Houston said that the funds previously raised by the company gives it a lot of flexibility. Dropbox is valued at about $10 billion, according to a February article from Re/code.

"That lets us do things on our own schedule so we're not in any kind of hurry to go to the public markets or anyone for financial reasons," Houston said.