Dropbox hits 150K paying business customers, with 50K joining this year

Dropbox, a company that provides free and premium version of a cloud file sync and sharing service, now boasts more than 150,000 paying business customers, cofounder and chief executive Drew Houston said today.

That’s up from 130,000 from a couple of months ago.

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“We have added 50,000 paying business customers in the past 10 months,” Houston said at the inaugural Dropbox Open customer conference in San Francisco.

Houston took this as an opportunity to compare itself to an unnamed “competitor” — most likely that would be publicly traded Box. “We’ve added more paying business customers than they have in their lifetime, think about that,” Houston said.

Dropbox now has more than 8 million business users, Houston said. As a whole, though, Dropbox has more than 400 million users.

Founded in 2007, the company has evolved from being an app primarily used for personal purposes to one that businesses can deploy for employees. Dropbox is arguably the hallmark of the consumerization of enterprise software. Now the question is how big of a business Dropbox can build.

Dropbox’s unnamed “competitor” is facing a “challenge,” Houston said, because it doesn’t “have that kind of bottoms-up adoption. It’s a lot harder for them to get customers.”

Based in San Francisco, Dropbox last announced funding in February 2014 at a reported $10 billion valuation. The company has been under pressure to show it’s worth at least that much money. Rather than focusing on developers (as it did in 2013 with the high-profile DBX conference), today Dropbox is all about customers — current and future alike.

Dropbox today also announced the launch of the Dropbox Enterprise service tier.