Though the company continues to lose money, it has reduced the red ink on its books, losing $111.7 million last year. “When you’ve really honed your focus and how to differentiate yourself, you can do well,” Aaron Levie, Box’s chief executive, said in an interview.ĭropbox’s business has grown rapidly over the past three years, reaching $1.1 billion in sales last year. Though analysts have long worried about the prospects of independent file-storage providers like Dropbox and Box, a competitor that went public three years ago, the companies have shown that they can survive. Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created Dropbox as a workaround for not having USB flash drives handy, and the company has become one of the giants in the business of sharing files online. Going public would be the biggest accomplishment yet for Dropbox since it was founded in 2007. Many learned that stretching for every last dollar of valuation could make it more difficult to raise additional capital in the future, or to attract and keep employees with stock grants.ĭropbox is likely to begin trading on the Nasdaq stock market - under the ticker symbol DBX - by the end of next week. Since then, companies have been more reserved. The lower potential valuation suggests that public market investors don’t share nearly the same enthusiasm for technology companies that venture capitalists once did, raising questions for a horde of other high-priced start-ups that are edging their way toward the public markets.ĭropbox attained its $10 billion valuation as a privately held company more than four years ago, in a different age for Silicon Valley, when many start-ups raced to collect as high a valuation as they could.
At the midpoint of that range, Dropbox would be valued at roughly $7.5 billion, including restricted stock units and options - well below the $10 billion it commanded during its last private fund-raising round. The San Francisco company said Monday that it planned to raise as much as $648 million in its initial public offering, pricing its shares between $16 and $18 each. But whether investors think the technology darling is more valuable as a publicly traded company or as a privately held start-up is debatable. Dropbox, the online file storage company, is poised to hold one of the year’s most highly awaited stock market debuts.
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