Dropbox Reaches Half A Billion Users, 8m Businesses

Dropbox’s cloud platform now has half a billion users, including 100 million outside the US.

CEO Drew Houston and co-foudner Arash Ferdowsi said they were delighted at reaching the milestone, having launched its original consumer service in 2008 and its business product in 2013.

Eight million businesses use Dropbox, 150,000 of which are paying customers, and 25,000 firms are added each quarter.

Dropbox user growth

“With 500 million signups under our belt, it’s exciting to see Dropbox connecting people around the world with everything that’s important to them,” the co-founders said in a blog post. “But this milestone hints at something much bigger—how much our users are working together.

“Since we started, Dropbox users have created 3.3 billion connections by sharing with each other. That’s a 51 percent jump in just the last year. And as new people join, they’re bringing friends, family, and co-workers along. Forty-four percent of new accounts were opened when existing users introduced people to Dropbox. That’s making for an even more creative and collaborative community.”

Houston and Ferdowsi, both of whom studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founded Dropbox in 2007 after becoming dissatisfied with existing storage services, which suffered from poor latency, lack of simplicity and an inability to deal with large files and because Houston kept on forgetting his USB flash drive.

Business expansion

Traditionally more popular with consumers, Dropbox’s expansion into the business world has been strengthened with new applications, integrations with Office 365, as well as the opening of a new London office. It competes in the enterprise market with the likes of Box and Google Drive.

However Dropbox has come under fire for its attitude towards privacy. When it launched new collaboration, security and developer tools in 2014, it dismissed claims by Edward Snowden that the company was “hostile to privacy.”

Last month it confirmed to TechWeekEurope plans to store European customers’ files in Germany thanks to a partnership with Amazon Web Services, adding it is “prepared” for the new EU-US ‘Privacy Shield’ data sharing agreement which is set to replace the previous Safe Harbour deal.

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