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San Francisco-based cloud storage and file-sharing provider Dropbox has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to a Jan. 11 Bloomberg News report.
This is not a surprise to IT industry watchers. Dropbox has been rumored to be going public for at least five years, and it looks like management is now serious about pulling the trigger.
According to the report, the company’s goal is to list on an exchange in the first half of 2018, with the listing to be led by Goldman Sachs Group and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Both Dropbox and JPMorgan have declined to comment.
Dropbox, which launched in 2008 but was late to the cloud-storage market behind Box, Mozy, Carbonite and several others, has 200,000 paying customers worldwide. Thanks to its freemium service model, Dropbox has about 500 million registered users—8 million of which are paying or non-paying business users.
Because its file containers can be opened by non-Dropbox customers, the service is used by an estimated 1 billion people worldwide to store and share files.
Its private-market valuation, based on previous venture capital fund-raising, is estimated at $10 billion. CEO Drew Houston reported a year ago in eWEEK that the company had reached a $1 billion annual revenue run rate.
Dropbox and music-serving application Spotify are two of the most closely-watched companies expected to go public in 2018. Ride-sharing company Lyft, payments startup Adyen and security provider Docusign are among a group of other IPO contenders waiting their turns.
Dropbox has been regular about updating its services and adding new ones during the last decade. Here is a listing of eWEEK articles chronicling this.