Dropbox reportedly files for IPO — privately
Dropbox, the San Francisco filesharing private company valued at $10 billion, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said.
Goldman Sachs Group 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 wants 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’s disappointing step into the public markets. How the stock fares will be an ongoing focus for both Wall Street and tech companies. Snap shares are down 15 percent from its March IPO.
Unlike money-losing Snap, Dropbox has annualized sales of more than $1 billion, CEO Drew Houston said in an interview last year. It’s also been profitable, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Those benchmarks are the product of more than two years of focusing the 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 technology 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 past 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 hopes to raise as much as $2.1 billion in an IPO expected to price Thursday. 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 this month.
Nonpublic filings have become more common since July, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began allowing all companies to file early IPO documents confidentially — a perk previously reserved for smaller businesses.
Dropbox achieved its $10 billion private valuation in its last private funding round in 2014. While it’s uncertain whether the company will be able to initially sell shares above that valuation, the stock could trade higher once it’s public, the people said.
As of August, Dropbox had 500 million users, including 200,000 businesses, storing and sharing files online through its cloud service. The service lets companies keep documents in a commonly accessible place without having to build their own server farms. The company will have to show potential investors how it’s differentiating its core filesharing products and newer collaboration tools from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Box.