Dropbox gobbles up another startup: CloudOn, a mobile tool for creating documents

Dropbox went on an acquisition spree last year, and today it made its first acquisition of 2015: CloudOn.

CloudOn got its start by enabling people to access and edit Microsoft Office documents on mobile, but later shifted to building its own mobile document editing tools. Both companies have confirmed the acquisition to VentureBeat.

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From a Dropbox spokesperson:

• We’re thrilled to have CloudOn’s talent join the Dropbox and Dropbox for Business engineering efforts and help us build collaboration capabilities that will help deliver ever better experiences around documents and workflow (for example, Dropbox’s partnership with Microsoft and strengthening initiatives like Project Harmony).
• The CloudOn engineers in Herzliya are joining us to form Dropbox’s first Israel office. With this addition, Dropbox will now have engineers based in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Dublin, and Israel.

CloudOn will be shutting down its service on March 15, and is not accepting new users starting today, the company said.

CloudOn’s acquisition is one of talent, especially as Dropbox looks to grow and scale internationally. CloudOn’s engineering team in Israel will be focused on research and development.

In late October, CloudOn released on iPad its first non-Microsoft Office app, which lets users create documents using convenient gestures and is highly compatible with Microsoft Word — “over 98 percent compatibility,” cofounder and chief executive Milind Gadekar told VentureBeat at the time.

Jay Zaveri, Milind Gadekar, and Meir Morgenstern founded CloudOn in 2009. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with an additional office in Herzliya, Israel. It has raised $26.1 million in total funding.

Dropbox announced nine acquisitions in 2014, and has announced 18 in total so far, according to CrunchBase. Later this week, rival Box is expected to debut on the New York Stock Exchange.