Data-sharing business Dropbox has filed for an initial public offering of up to US$500 million with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The cloud storage vendor plans to have its common stock listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "DBX”.
Dropbox, which started as a free service to share and store photos, music and other large files, is facing heated competition from technology giants including Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com.
The business reported 2017 revenue of US$1.11 billion, compared with US$844.8 million a year earlier, while the company's net loss narrowed to US$111.7 million from US$210.2 million.
“With over a $1 billion in revenues it speaks to Dropbox’s success over the past few years and is an impressive number in a fertile space," said Daniel Ives at research firm GBH Insights. "Dropbox’s business model has scaled successfully."
The company's biggest challenge is explaining to Wall Street what differentiates Dropbox from its many competitors, Box CEO Aaron Levie told Reuters on Friday.
“If Dropbox continues to focus on their user experience, they'll be able to compete successfully for consumers and professionals,” Levie said.
Based in California, the digital storage firm has around 11 million paid users across 180 countries, with about half of its 2017 revenue coming from customers outside the United States.
The filing comes more than a month after the company was rumoured to have confidentially filed for an IPO, as reported by ARN.
Goldman Sachs & Co LLC, J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank Securities are some of the leading underwriters for the IPO.
The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filing is usually a placeholder.
(Reporting by Laharee Chatterjee in Bengaluru)
