Tech

Dropbox secretly files to go public

Key Points
  • Dropbox, last valued at $10 billion, hired Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to handle the offering, according to Bloomberg.
Dropbox files confidentially for IPO -Report
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Dropbox files confidentially for IPO -Report

Dropbox has secretly filed to go public in the first half of this year, a source familiar with the deal confirmed to CNBC.

The cloud company, last valued at $10 billion, hired Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to handle the U.S. offering, according to Bloomberg, which previously reported the confidential IPO filings.

J.P. Morgan was not immediately available to comment on the report. Dropbox and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston, co-founders of Dropbox
Getty Images

With annualized sales of more than $1 billion, Dropbox has long been considered a hot IPO prospect on Wall Street, and Goldman and J.P. Morgan were said to be in the running for the deal as early as July 2017, Bloomberg earlier reported.

This deal would represent the first IPO from the Y Combinator portfolio, and a maturing of accelerators, the early-stage investment vehicles that first became popular in the mid-2000s.

The data storage company has become an entrepreneurship case study on the success of the "freemium" model in straddling consumer and enterprise markets. But it is not without competition, as more and more companies have entered the file-sharing market since Dropbox's founding in 2007.

Box, a similar company with a focus on the enterprise market, saw shares rise 3.5 percent on Thursday around the time the Dropbox IPO was reported.

Correction: Dropbox was founded in 2007. An earlier version misstated the year the company was established.