The web-based file hosting service Dropbox is planning to become a public company this spring.
Last valued at $10 billion, Dropbox may be one of the biggest companies to list themselves of late. Such a big IPO filing has only been rivaled by the global payment company First Data (NYSE: FDC) which was worth $14 billion when it was approved for an IPO in 2015. As such, Dropbox's filing for an IPO is reportedly backed by American finance companies Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and JP Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM). Given that the IPO filing is confidential, other potential supporters have not been announced, although the private company plans to add more banks to its IPO during this year. The Silicon Valley-birthed company will join other companies that have been hotly awaited for to apply for IPOs, such as ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft, and the music streaming service Spotify, which also plans to become public this year.
Founded in 2002 by former Massachusetts Institute of Technology students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox developed out of a desire to navigate the internet's then-slow nature and difficulties with large files. The service provided users with the unique ability to access files on the web, an ability that largely helped Ferdowsi as a MIT student who often forgot his USB drive for class.
Since then, the company had 500 million users as of 2016, including approximately 200,000 businesses. The company is currently carving its own path towards successful cloud storage capability, reportedly spending millions on data centers to rival that of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). In a cost effective move, the company is also removing themselves from Amazon servers, which will allow the company to focus on new internal updates such as the formation of shared documents among users. Although Dropbox remains strong, the company has also suffered from failures along the way with heavy free spending and an failed attempt at their own photo app.
Like any company applying for IPO, the risks are not invisible. Last year witnessed the failures of new public companies such as the social media mobile app Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP) and the meal kit company Blue Apron (NYSE:APRN). Although both IPOs were highly anticipated, disappointing revenues following their respective IPO led some investors to slowly lose faith. One impediment to Dropbox that is arguably hurtful is the likelihood of success given other file hosting companies such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). Given that large companies are offering their customers more for less, the appeal that Dropbox once had as a cheap option for data storage is slowly depleting. In addition, Dropbox's value has notably decreased since their 2014 worth of $10 billion. Impressive gains as a growing company have caused many to refer to Dropbox as a "unicorn," but early success may not be indicative of success as an IPO with bigger competitors. Finally, Dropbox's status as a growing company means that cloud reliability may become a problem in the coming years. Given that Dropbox still has the chance of facing connectivity and bandwidth issues, users' reliability on Dropbox's cloud system may falter. Fortunately for the company, a major outage has not occurred since 2014.