Founders: Drew Houston, Arash Ferdowsi
Launched: 2007
Funding: $1.1 billion
Valuation: $10.4 billion
Disrupting: Data storage, cloud services, consumer technology
Rival: Box.com
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston
The cloud-based file-sharing company, Dropbox, is continuing its expansion outside the United States. In late May, it announced the opening of its first office in Hamburg, Germany. This new location is part of a bigger push into Europe, which also includes a recent office opening in Amsterdam. Dropbox already has offices in Dublin, London and Paris and says that more than 75 percent of its 500 million users are outside the United States. In fact, the company has users in about 200 countries, and its product is available in 20 languages.
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Dropbox was started in 2007 by MIT graduate Drew Houston, who soon brought on fellow classmate Arash Ferdowsi to help develop its early plans. The New York City-based firm claims it has 150,000 business customers who pay about $150 per employee each year. (Consumers can use up to 2GB of data for free.)
Dropbox says it is adding about 25,000 new business customers each quarter. They'll be in good company: Current customers include Under Armour, National Geographic, Hyatt Hotels, MIT, Hearst and Yahoo.
As a private company, it's already raised more than $1 billion in venture financing from Benchmark, Greylock Partners and BlackRock, and at press time it was valued at around $10 billion. The company doesn't release revenue figures, but the last time it raised money in 2014, reports pegged its top line at $400 million, nearly double the amount the year before.
