Dropbox acquires stealthy data analytics startup Parastructure

Dropbox has acquired Parastructure, a stealthy startup that devised software for analyzing companies’ data, VentureBeat has confirmed.

The startup was “going after piece of analytic and business-intelligence stack that was under-served,” a person familiar with the matter said.

Rather than provide features for all 300 million people who use Dropbox, Parastructure’s application is more likely to be incorporated into technology for Dropbox employees who want to get a picture of what’s going on, according to VentureBeat’s source.

Dropbox spokespeople declined to comment. Parastructure did not respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment.

The deal went through for somewhere between $10 million and $50 million, TechCrunch reported earlier today.

Dropbox, which has raised lots of money in recent months and could still go public this year, has been on a roll with acquisitions lately.

In the past two months alone it has bought (at least) seven other startups: Readmill, Zulip, Loom, Hackpad, Bubbli, Droptalk, and MobileSpan.

Next-generation business-intelligence software stands out from those other acquisitions in being more focused on analytics than on end-user features. But then again, perhaps Dropbox wanted to analyze its data and wasn’t satisfied with any of the many products already available, like Birst, DataRPM, or Domo. Our source said its visualization capabilities were unlike anything else on the market.

Parastructure started in 2012 with headquarters in San Francisco. It had taken on seed funding and had brought in revenue from early users. The team was still reasonably small at the time of the deal.

The startup’s advisors include Cloudera co-founder Amr Awadallah and investor Steve O’Hara of the Valley Fund.