US-based collaboration and data storage platform Dropbox went public in a $756m IPO, which took place on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The company issued 36 million shares that were priced at $21 each, giving it a total market capitalization of $8.22bn. Dropbox had reportedly upped its price range from $16 to $18 per share, to $18 to $20.
The flotation came after Dropbox had raised $600m in equity funding as well as $1.1bn in debt financing. In one of its latest rounds, the company had raised $350m in a 2014 round that featured media-focused merchant bank Allen & Company as well as investment firms Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. That round valued it at $10bn.
Dropbox also counts Salesforce Ventures, the venturing unit of cloud computing platform Salesforce, as a backer, although the latter never officially disclosed the details of its commitment. It was revealed during the IPO, however, that Salesforce had acquired 4.76m additional shares by investing $100m via a private placement.
Founded in 2007, Dropbox has developed a cloud-based storage and sharing platform with over 500 million users, 200,000 of which are businesses and more 11 million of which pay for subscriptions. In 2017, the company managed to almost cut by half its net losses from $210m to about $112m, while its revenue went up from almost $845m to over $1.1bn.
This IPO is part of larger the cloud technology space, which has suffered no lack of interest by corporate investors, with numerous applications of the technology across multiples sectors – from IT through consumer and services to energy and transport, as the GCV Analytics bar chart shows. Over the past two years, however, the count of corporate-backed rounds in this space appears to have leveled off at 113 deals for 2016 and 2017, respectively, while the estimated total capital raised in those rounds went up from $3.14bn in 2016 to $4.20bn last year.
