Dropbox closes another $250M, rocketing valuation to $10B

Dropbox has closed a long-anticipated $250 million in new funding, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

This puts the cloud-storage firm’s valuation close to $10 billion and makes Dropbox one of the highest-valued venture-backed companies out there.

Now with this massive round of funding and continued momentum, Dropbox is fueling rumors of a 2014 IPO.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 out of cofounders Drew Houston’s and Arash Ferdowsi’s frustration with having to email themselves files when they wanted to work from more than one computer. The company has since experienced phenomenal growth. It now has more than 200 million users, and people save 1 billion files to Dropbox every day — that’s more than the number of daily tweets on Twitter.

Dropbox unveiled a major redesign in November that pushed it deeper into the enterprise sector. The new Dropbox for business product makes it easier to switch between personal and business accounts, and gives IT administrators and managers more control over permissions.

The New York Times reported back in November that Dropbox was seeking to raise another $250 million — two years after its $250 million round from 2011. Estimates at the time put Dropbox’s valuation at $8 billion.

This report emerged right around the time that Dropbox’s biggest competitor, Box, closed $100 million in funding. The cloud-storage sector is fearsomely competitive, and these companies are slurping up massive rounds of funding at a furious rate as they strive for market leadership.

VentureBeat’s Eric Blattberg wrote that the determining factor in who wins would be enterprise adoption. And Box, which started out as an enterprise product, has an edge here. Dropbox has also been criticized for security lapses, which doesn’t bode well for attracting enterprise clients.

This round was led by investment fund BlackRock. Investors in Dropbox’s previous round include Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Accel Partners.This brings Dropbox’s total capital raised to $507 million dollar.