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The story
Dropbox founder Drew Houston conceived the Dropbox concept after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT.
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."
User growth
Dropbox saw steady user growth after its inception. It surpassed the 1 million registered users milestone in April 2009, followed by 2 million in September, and 3 million in November. It passed 50 million users in October 2011, 100 million in November 2012, 500 million in 2016, and 700 million in 2021.
Acquisitions
In July 2012, Dropbox acquired TapEngage, an advertising startup. The following December, Dropbox acquired two companies; Audiogalaxy, a music-streaming startup, and Snapjoy, a company that provided photo organization tools for mobile platforms. In July 2013, Dropbox acquired Endorse, a startup which offered mobile coupons.
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 May 2014, Dropbox acquired Bubbli, a 3D graphics startup.
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.
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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.
Remote workforce
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dropbox was one of the first companies to shift to a remote workforce. In October 2020, the company announced its "virtual first" initiative which would shift the company to a long-term remote working plan, which launched officially April 2021.
Workforce reductions
In January 2021, Dropbox CEO Houston announced the layoff of 315 employees, which was approximately 11 percent of the workforce at the time. The company said the reductions were necessary in order to focus the company team structure and focus on top level priorities. The software firm also announced that COO Olivia Nottebohm would be leaving the company on February 5, 2021. In the same month, Dropbox announced it would sublease much of its office space in a transition to remote work.
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.
Leadership change
In May 2026, Dropbox announced that co-founder Drew Houston will step down from the role of chief executive officer to assume the role of executive chairman. The company said Houston will serve as co-CEO with Ashraf Alkarmi for an initial period before transitioning to the chairman role. Alkarmi, who is the company's chief product officer, will become the company's permanent CEO thereafter. Dropbox also announced the appointment of Mike Torres, who will replace Alkarmi as chief product officer from Google in July 2026.
From Wikipedia’s article on Dropbox, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5