Dropbox quietly files to go public

Dropbox Inc., the file-sharing private company valued at $10 billion, has filed confidentially for a U.S. initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will lead the potential listing, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the filing wasn’t public. Dropbox is talking to other banks this month to fill additional roles on the IPO, the people said. The company is aiming to list in the first half of this year, one of the people said.

Representatives for Dropbox, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan declined to comment.

A share sale by Dropbox, one of a closely watched group of high-profile private tech companies with multibillion-dollar valuations, would follow Snap Inc.’s disappointing step into the public markets. Wall Street and the tech community will focus on how the stock fares. Snap shares are down 15% from its IPO in March.

Unlike money-losing Snap, Dropbox will come to the table with annualized sales of more than $1 billion, Chief Executive Drew Houston said in an interview last year. And it has been profitable, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Those benchmarks are the product of more than two years of focusing the San Francisco company, expanding its product suite for businesses and reining in expenses, Houston said at the time.

Dropbox could be one of the biggest U.S. enterprise techn companies to list domestically in recent years. First Data Corp. went public at a market value of about $14 billion in 2015 — the biggest such IPO in the last five years.

Dropbox joins a growing list of large tech companies preparing to go public in the U.S. early this year. Apollo Global Management’s security company ADT Inc. is aiming to raise as much as $2.1 billion in an IPO expected to price on Jan. 18. Spotify, owner of the world’s largest paid music service, plans to execute its unconventional direct listing this quarter, a person familiar with the matter said.