Dropbox Values Itself At £5bn As It Seeks Fresh Funding – Report

Dropbox reportedly plans to raise $250 million (£156m) in fresh financing in the next few weeks, giving the cloud storage provider a value of $8 billion (£5m).

According to Bloomberg, the firm has already raised $257 million during its five years of operation, but is seeking a cash injection to continue its push into the enterprise space.

Dropbox’s growth has been fuelled by its popularity among consumers, but the firm has recently launched Dropbox for Business in an effort to attract enterprises which will traditionally pay more for file storage services.

Dropbox for business

The number of Dropbox users now stands at 200 million, a ten-fold increase from 2010, while its revenue stream is now in the ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’.

CEO and co-founder Drew Houston has apparently claimed Dropbox is yet to spend all of its existing funds, with previous investors including U2 members Bono and The Edge, but its expansion into the business space will require the hiring of potentially costly sales and engineering teams, along with additional software and technology.

This will bring Dropbox into closer competition with the likes of Google Drive and SkyDrive, as well as Box, which is reportedly considering an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in early 2010, and markets itself almost exclusively to businesses.

Last week, Dropbox for Business added the ability to link personal and business accounts across a range of devices, along with shared audit logs, remote wiping and account transfer features.

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