2018 IPO Prospects: Will Dropbox Be Able To Compete With The Giants?

Photo Credit: Ian Lamont/Flickr.com

According to a Research and Markets report published last year, the global Cloud Storage Market is expected to grow at a substantial rate of 30% annually over the next few years to $92.488 billion by 2022 from $25.171 billion in 2017. Recently, Billion Dollar Unicorn player Dropbox filed its S-1 to go public. The company had been waiting to list for a while, but last year’s disappointing technology market IPO performance forced it to stay away.

Dropbox’s Financials

California-based Dropbox was founded in 2007 by university graduates Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsiafter the idea behind the service came to Drew on a bus ride. Drew was on the bus when he realized he needed to access some files on a USB drive he had left somewhere else. Soon, Dropbox was released to offer cloud-based freemium storage service to individuals and organizations.

Dropbox’s service has seen strong adoption in the market. Its revenue has grown from $603.8 million in 2015 to $844.8 million in 2016 to $1.106.8 billion in 2017. Losses have reduced during the same period from $325.9 million in 2015 to $210.2 million in 2016 to $111.7 million in 2017. It has not been profitable, but it has been cash flow positive since 2016.

Among operating metrics, paying users have grown from 6.5 million in 2015 to 11 million in 2017. While that is strong growth, it is still a small number compared with the more than 500 million registered users that the service has over 180 countries.

Dropbox has been venture funded so far. It has raised $1.7 billion from venture investors and through long-term debts. Its investors include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Innovation Department, QueensBridge Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Index Ventures, Accel Partners, AFSquare, Benchmark, Glynn Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Valiant Capital Partners, Ali Partovi, Amidzad Partners, Bobby Yazdani, Hadi Partovi, Pejman Nozad, Signatures Capital, and Y Combinator. Its valuation had soared to $10 billion in 2014, but market reassessment in 2015 reduced it to nearly half that amount.