Long-rumored to be eyeing a public offering, the $10B file-sharing company has finally taken the plunge and filed confidentially for IPO.
Scheduled for the first half of 2018, they’ll be the first private tech darling to enter the waters since Snap’s poor showing last year.
But let’s be clear: they’re no Snapchat
Dropbox is doing over $1B in annualized sales and are cash flow positive. They’re also loosely profitable (excluding technical accounting things like interest, taxes, depreciation, etc).
And, while their 500m users are nothing to scoff at, their biggest edge is that their cloud operates independently from Amazon Web Services, thanks to a hefty investment to build out their own data servers. This allows them to steer their own ship and keep data transfer costs low.
That said, they have some stiff competition in the file sharing space
Google recently rolled out a business tier for Drive, and continues to add functionality to the file sharing platform, while Microsoft has their own version, OneDrive.
Meanwhile, their closest competitor, Box, has been publicly trading since 2015 (its shares have risen 50% in the past 2 years). File this market under “C” for “crowded.”