Founders: Drew Houston (CEO), Arash Ferdowsi
Launched: 2007
Funding: $607.2 million
Valuation: $10 billion (PitchBook)
Disrupting: Data storage, cloud services, consumer technology
Rival: Box.com
George Kavallines
Dropbox, the cloud-based file-sharing company, just took one step closer to becoming a public company. Co-founder and CEO Drew Houston told Bloomberg in April that the company has hit certain revenue and profit milestones that investors want to see before a company files for an IPO. Revenue has hit $1 billion on an annualized basis, and Houston says the company is generating a profit, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Dropbox also recently secured a $600 million credit line from six banks, led by JPMorgan Chase, giving it financial flexibility as it considers a public offering, which reports say could happen as early as year's end.
Read More FULL LIST: 2017 DISRUPTOR 50
MIT graduate Houston and classmate Arash Ferdowski launched Dropbox in 2007. Today the San Francisco-based company has offices in 13 cities and users in 200 countries and territories around the world. Dropbox is available in 20 languages. There are 500 million registered users, and the company claims it has grown to 200,000 business customers (Under Armour, National Geographic and News Corp. are just a few) that pay $150 per employee per year for the standard package of two terabytes of data. The company recently updated its Dropbox mobile app and Paper app. The latter lets users continue working on and accessing documents even when an internet connection is lost. Once the user is back online, changes are synced so that the most recent version is always available.
The company has already raised more than $600 million in equity funding from Benchmark, Greylock Partners and BlackRock and is valued at around $10 billion, according to PitchBook. With the new $600 million line of credit, observers say it's just a matter of time before a Dropbox offering is making headlines.
