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.
