Last year, we saw Dropbox Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston say that the company had no plans to go public anytime soon. Looks like that stand is over. Apparently, the popular file-storage company has met with advisers to discuss the possibility of an initial public offering next year.
The San Francisco-based company’s biggest potential rival, Box Inc. went public last year at a $1.7 billion valuation. This was actually 29 percent below the value Box fetched in a private funding round six months earlier. The same noose hangs above every US company that is planning to go public.
With that out, most companies are holding off on offering an IPO for a while now. These concerns, however, aren’t affecting Dropbox, according to a Bloomberg report.
Reportedly, the company’s management met with advisers to discuss the “feasibility” of a public issue. Insiders close to the matter have stated that the talks were vague and just exploratory in nature. The management also wanted to assess the company’s valuation in the eyes of investors in such a scenario.
While this may not seem much, the discussion clearly shows that Dropbox has shifted its focus since last year. Following this revelation, many investors have written down the value of their holdings in the company. A few others have raised doubts over the company’s valuations of $10 billion in its last round of funding in 2014.
According to CEO Houston, Dropbox is free-cash-flow positive currently. And although it isn’t making any money yet, its popularity is proof enough that this won’t be a problem.
Dropbox initially worked specifically as a file-storage and syncing system. With increase in popularity, it is now trying to expand into the larger market of cloud-based collaboration. We saw many new offerings from the company, this year, that point toward just that.
The company hosts nearly 200,000 business teams which include big names like Adidas. Along with this, more than 500 million registered users work with the service worldwide.
