Dropbox acquires collaboration startup Cove and its former Facebook execs

Cloud storage powerhouse Dropbox has purchased stealth collaboration startup Cove and its exec team made up of former Facebook staffers, the company said Monday.

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The new hires include three former Facebook engineering execs, including the married dream team of Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, who worked at Facebook between 2005 and 2010. At Facebook, Agarwal served as the engineering director responsible for search and news feed, while Sanghvi was Facebook’s first female engineer and a product manager. The acquisition will also bring Cove co-founder Akhil Wable and Cove employee Joshua Jenkins into the fold at Dropbox.

The ultra-low-key service Cove, which focused on collaboration and communication for mid-size organizations, had an alpha launch but never went much further than that, according to an interview Sanghvi had with AllThingsD. Dropbox apparently had a friendly relationship with Agarwal and Sanghvi, so it wasn’t hard to convince them to come on board.

The Cove buy is Dropbox’s first-ever acquisition, which shows just how far the company has come in the past year. Dropbox closed a jaw-dropping $250 million round last October, and at that time it said it would pursue acquisitions and grow its team.

Predictably, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.