Dropbox has ambitions to become more than just an online storage & syncing company — it wants to be your online presence and the center for all your apps. And in order to make that vision possible, the San Francisco-based company snapped up Orchestra, the company behind the buzzy Mailbox app.
So how much did Dropbox pay for Mailbox? My sources are putting the number at north of $50 million. At least one source claimed that the final amount was a lot closer to $100 million. My sources say that the company was in talks with Yahoo (s YHOO) but it was bested by Facebook (s FB), who in turn was beaten to the punch by Dropbox. Dropbox is valued at about $4 billion and has become an active acquirer of small teams and tiny startups.
Given that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Orchestra had previously raised $5.3 million (from Charles River Ventures, CrunchFund and others) at a valuation that was somewhere between $15-to-$20 million, the $50 million (or higher) is a hefty return for its investors, considering that the company was a long way from becoming a real legitimate business.
Dropbox’s desire to become a bigger platform have been known for a while, but the company has yet to provide any concrete information about how well it is doing as it tried to become become our online hub.
Acquisition or acqui-hire?
Silicon Valley crazy making. A big story like this for every 1000 failures.
Am I the only one left not using DropBox? I’m starting to get mighty paranoid over the lack of control over our data more and more….
I still don’t use Dropbox.
However, I do use Mailbox. And I’m way, way, much more than glad that Facebook didn’t buy it.
Dropbox is worth $4 billion? What kind of revenue, profit, and growth rate do they have?
This new acquisition by Dropbox is a great news for users of both services. Updates from Dropbox have been much appreciated lately because of the innovation and thought behind it. The recent integration of Dropbox with GroupDocs is a great addition to the capabilities of both cloud-based services. Users can now use both services at the same time. They can access their Dropbox files from their GroupDocs account and perform document annotation, conversion and various other tasks. The updated files can then be saved in the cloud via Dropbox storage. To read more on this announcement, click:
http://groupdocs.com/blog/groupdocs-document-management/archive/2012/08/15/announcing-dropbox-integration-with-groupdocs-apps-suite.html
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