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Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Dropbox has experienced criticism and generated controversy for issues including security breaches and privacy concerns.
Houston founded Evenflow, Inc. in May 2007 as the company behind Dropbox, and shortly thereafter secured seed funding from Y Combinator. Dropbox was officially launched at 2008's TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual technology conference. Owing to trademark disputes between Domains by Proxy, Inc. and Evenflow, Dropbox's official domain name was " getdropbox.com" until October 2009, when it acquired its current domain, "dropbox.com". In October 2009, Evenflow, Inc. was renamed Dropbox, Inc.
In an interview with TechCrunch's "Founder Stories" in October 2011, Houston explained that a demo video was released during Dropbox's early days, with one viewer being Arash Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi was "so impressed" that they formed a partnership. In regards to competition, Houston stated that "It is easy for me to explain the idea, it is actually really hard to do it."
In May 2014, Dropbox acquired Bubbli, a startup that has "built some innovative ways of incorporating 3D technology into 2D views, and packaging it in a mobile app".
In January 2015, Dropbox acquired CloudOn, a company that provided mobile applications for document editing and creation. At the same time, Dropbox told TechCrunch that CloudOn's base in Herzliya would become the first Dropbox office in Israel. In July, Dropbox acquired Clementine, an enterprise communication service.
In April 2014, Dropbox acquired photo-sharing company Loom (which would be shut down and integrated with the then-recently announced Carousel), and document-sharing startup Hackpad. Dropbox later announced in April 2017 that Hackpad would be shut down on July 19, with all notes being migrated to Dropbox Paper.
In January 2019, Dropbox acquired e-signature company HelloSign. The acquisition was reported to be Dropbox's largest to date, at a reported $230 million.
In March 2021, Dropbox announced the acquisition of DocSend. DocSend offers a secure document sharing and analytics product.
In October 2021, Dropbox announced that an agreement to acquire universal search company Command E has been signed.
In November 2022, Dropbox announced that an agreement to acquire several key assets from Boxcryptor has been signed. Boxcryptor is a provider of end-to-end zero-knowledge encryption for cloud storage services.
In December 2022, Dropbox announced the acquisition of form management platform FormSwift for $95 million.
In August 2024, Dropbox announced the acquisition of AI scheduling tool Reclaim.ai.
In April 2023, Houston announced the layoff of roughly 500 employees, or 16 percent of the current workforce. The company cited a slowdown in growth and a need for different, AI-focused skill-sets. In October 2024, Houston announced the layoff of roughly 528 employees, or 20 percent of the current workforce.
Dropbox's apps offer an automatic photo uploading feature, allowing users to automatically upload photos or videos from cameras, Tablet computer, Secure Digital, or to a dedicated "Camera Uploads" folder in their Dropbox. Users are given 500 of extra space for uploading their first photo, and are given up to 3 of extra space if users continue using the method for more photos.
In July 2014, Dropbox introduced "streaming sync" for its computer apps. Streaming sync was described as a new "supercharged" synchronization speed for large files that improves the upload or download time by up to 2 times.
In August 2015, Dropbox announced the availability of "Universal 2nd Factor" USB , providing two-factor authentication for logging into its services.
In October 2008, Dropbox raised a $6 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Accel.
A May 2010 report in The Wall Street Journal said that "since founder started reading Eric Ries' Lean startup blog about a year ago, the company has started trickling out new features when they are ready instead of waiting to launch a fully featured product. That helps test customer appetite, he says, dubbing the practice "minimum viable product".
TechCrunch reported in July 2011 that Dropbox had been looking to raise between US$200 and US$300 million, and had a valuation "to end up in the $5 billion to $10 billion range. ... quite a step up from its previous funding rounds which have totalled a tiny $7.2 million". As noted in a Forbes article, Dropbox had "revenue on track to hit $240 million in 2011".
In April 2012, Dropbox announced that Bono and The Edge, two members of the Irish rock band U2, were individual investors in the company.
In 2014 Dropbox raised financing from BlackRock Inc. and others that values the company at $10 billion.
In March 2017, Bloomberg reported that Dropbox had secured a US$600 million credit line, with the company expected to file for its initial public offering (IPO) "as soon as this year".
In February 2018, Dropbox filed an IPO to be listed on the NASDAQ. The company's initial intent was to raise $500 million. Dropbox's stock rose 42 percent to $29.89 in its first day of trading on March 23, 2018.
As of February 2021, Dropbox had been profitable in the last three quarters.
Dropbox Basic users are given two of free storage space. This can be expanded through referrals; users recommend the service to other people, and if those people start using the service, the user is awarded additional 500 of storage space. Dropbox Basic users can earn up to 16 gigabytes through the referral program.
The Dropbox Plus subscription (named Dropbox Pro prior to March 2017) gives users 2 terabytes of storage space, as well as additional features, including:
In November 2013, Dropbox announced changes to "Dropbox for Business" that would enable users to connect both their personal Dropbox and their business Dropbox to the same device, with each of the folders being "properly labeled for personal or work, and come with its own password, contacts, settings, and files". Furthermore, Dropbox announced shared audit logs, remote wipe for business administrators, and account transfers, as new features of its Business offering. In January 2017, Dropbox introduced "Smart Sync" for Business and Enterprise customers, a feature that lets Windows and macOS users see all files in the Dropbox folder, but only download specific files on-demand.
Similar to Dropbox Basic, Dropbox Plus users can also earn extra space through referrals. Plus users earn 1 gigabyte per referral, up to 32 gigabytes.
Dropbox Business is Dropbox's application for corporations, adding more business-centered functionality for teams, including collaboration tools, advanced security and control, unlimited file recovery, user management and granular permissions, and options for unlimited storage. For large organizations, Dropbox offers Dropbox Enterprise, the "highest tier" of its product offerings, adding domain management tools, an assigned Dropbox customer support member, and help from "expert advisors" on deployment and user training.
In July 2016, Dropbox announced a new "AdminX" administrator dashboard for Business customers, offering improved control of company files and users. In June 2017, the AdminX dashboard was given a redesign and additional administrator functions, such as log-in durations, custom password strength parameters, and setting specific subdomain verifications for individual teams.
When a file or folder is deleted, users can recover it within 30 days. For Dropbox Plus users, this recovery time can be extended to one year, by purchasing an "Extended Version History" add-on.
Dropbox accounts that are not accessed or emails not replied in a year are automatically deleted.
Dropbox also offers a LAN sync feature, where, instead of receiving information and data from the Dropbox servers, computers on the local network can exchange files directly between each other, potentially significantly improving synchronization speeds. LAN Sync discovers other peers on the same network via UDP port 17500 using a proprietary discovery protocol developed by early Dropbox engineer Paul Bohm in 2010.
Originally, the Dropbox servers and computer apps were written in Python. In July 2014, Dropbox began migrating its performance-critical backend infrastructure to Go.
In September 2012, Dropbox's website code base was rewritten from JavaScript to CoffeeScript.
Dropbox originally used Amazon's S3 storage system to store user files, but between 2014 and 2016 they gradually moved away from Amazon to use their own hardware, referred to as "Magic Pocket", due to Dropbox's description as "a place where you keep all your stuff, it doesn't get lost, and you can always access it". In June 2017, the company announced a major global network expansion, aiming to increase synchronization speeds while cutting costs. The expansion, starting with 14 cities across 7 countries on 3 continents, adds "hundreds of gigabits of Internet connectivity with transit providers (regional and global ISPs), and hundreds of new peering partners (where we exchange traffic directly rather than through an ISP)".
Dropbox uses SSL transfers for synchronization and stores the data via Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-256 encryption.
The functionality of Dropbox can be integrated into third-party applications through an application programming interface (API).
Dropbox prevents sharing of copyrighted data, by checking the hash of files shared in public folders or between users against a blacklist of copyrighted material. This only applies to files or folders shared with other users or publicly, and not to files kept in an individual's Dropbox folder that are not shared.
In December 2015, Dropbox announced the shut-down of Mailbox.
In 2011, Business Insider named Dropbox the world's sixth most valuable startup, and in 2017, the publication ranked Dropbox as the eighth most valuable US startup, with a valuation of $10 billion. It has been described as one of Y Combinator's most successful investments to date. Apple launched its own cloud storage service later in 2011, iCloud, but this did not hold back Dropbox's growth. “How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions” (July 16, 2018) In January 2012, Dropbox was named startup of the year by TechCrunch.
Dropbox has been blocked in China since 2014.JON RUSSELL. Dropbox is blocked again in China, both apps and web-based service appear affected. . thenextweb.com 2014-06-19. 2019-01-08.
While Dropbox uses SSL to encrypt data in transit between itself and customers and stores data in encrypted form, it does not use end-to-end encryption in which the user controls the keys used to encrypt the stored data. As a result, Dropbox can decrypt customers' data if it chooses to.
In December 2012, Dropbox set up an office in Dublin, Ireland, its first office outside the United States.
Dropbox expanded into its second U.S. office in Austin, Texas, in February 2014. The State of Texas and City of Austin provided a $1.7 million performance-based incentives package to Dropbox in exchange for locating their office in Austin. In April, of the same year, Dropbox opened an office in Sydney.
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