What will the co-founders of Dropbox spend their investors' money on and how is the service becoming similar to Twitter?

The American service Dropbox, which allows you to store files in the cloud and synchronize them between different devices, has attracted another round of investment - for $250 million. Investors valued the company itself at $10 billion, this is one of the largest figures in the venture capital market.

Dropbox representatives have not yet officially confirmed the attraction of new investments, but Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported this, citing their own sources. According to WSJ, the new round was led by one of the world's largest asset management companies, BlackRock.

Along the way Twitter

Dropbox was created in 2007 by two MIT students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. They're just tired of emailing files to themselves to work on multiple computers. Now Houston is the CEO of Dropbox, Ferdowsi is the CTO. The service team has grown to 500 people.

Dropbox users have 2 GB of cloud storage available for free, which can be accessed from a smartphone, laptop or tablet. Any changes to the file are also instantly broadcast to all user devices. For $10 per month you can get 100 GB of space.

Houston and Ferdowsi received their first investment of $15,000 from the Y Combinator startup incubator. With this money, the founders of Dropbox rented an apartment for an office and bought one powerful computer. By 2008, the service had already raised $7.2 million, and in December 2009, Apple showed interest in the startup. However, Houston refused the deal, although the iPhone manufacturer promised him a nine-figure sum.

In September 2011, Dropbox attracted $250 million in investment from Goldman Sachs and a number of leading venture funds - Sequoia Capital, Index Capital, Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Investors then valued the company at $4 billion. “Dropbox shares were in great demand. Everyone wanted to join the deal,” one of the investors told Forbes.

The history of Dropbox is reminiscent of Twitter, beloved by investors, which for a long time developed through venture capital investments and was in no hurry to carry out an IPO. The popular microblogging service, also founded in 2007, managed to attract about $1 billion before going public in 2013.

In the fall, Houston said that Dropbox does not want to go public yet. “I think we will do it eventually. But now I just want to focus on recruiting a team, creating a foundation, creating the next generation of products,” he told WSJ. The fact that Dropbox is not yet planning an IPO was evidenced by the fact that the company still does not have a CFO.

The current $250 million may not be the last investment in Dropbox in the near future. According to the Re/Code portal, another $100-150 million can be invested into the service by Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.

From individuals to businesses

Dropbox makes money by converting customers to paid accounts. The free volume on the service is enough for about 900 medium-sized photos. And even if the service stops attracting new users for some time, it will still continue to earn money: users will buy more storage space for themselves.

So far, however, the flow of new clients has not dried up. If at the end of 2011 about 50 million people used the service, then in November 2012 - already 100 million. Now this figure has surpassed the 200 million mark. The Dropbox application is pre-installed on smartphones from a number of leading manufacturers, for example Samsung. New customers are also attracted by the users themselves, who receive free space in the data storage for this.

At the end of 2013, the service decided to win business clients by launching Dropbox for Business. Business accounts (for companies with at least 5 employees) are already used by about 4 million organizations. For $15 per month per employee, the company gets unlimited storage space.

As TechCrunch notes , Dropbox can direct the raised funds specifically to the business area. For example, to increase the number of employees responsible for sales, or to attract top managers of large Internet companies who will help develop a network of partners. Moreover, Dropbox has already lured away employees from Facebook and Spotify who were working with partners.

Dropbox does not disclose financial figures. According to the WSJ, the company's revenue in 2013 will exceed $200 million. In 2012, Dropbox's revenue was $116 million, more than doubling from 2011 ($46 million). The same figure for 2010 was $12 million.

As Dropbox's number of users and revenue grows, so does its number of competitors. In June 2011, Apple entered the market where Dropbox was one of the pioneers with its iCloud. In April 2012, Google joined the race with the launch of its Disk storage service. At the same time, smartphones on the Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) platforms now account for the overwhelming market share.

Microsoft and Amazon are also trying to take users away from Dropbox in the cloud storage segment. There are competitors in local markets as well - for example, similar services were launched by the Russian Mail.Ru Group and Yandex. But investors don't seem to be deterred by competition.

Money in the clouds: Dropbox has attracted another $250 million in investments