Dropbox announced on March 15 that it had acquired Mailbox which is a much talked about email management app. Previously it was reported that Mailbox was looking to raise funds for its business and the early stage startup was off to a very good start with thousands of people on a wait list to get a chance and use the service. TechCrunch reports that the deal cost DropBox a nice chunk of chane with multiple sources quoted as saying the deal was worth “well over” $50 million. Their is also a rumor according to TechCrunch that the entire deal was worth $100 million in cash and stock.
Mailbox was founded by Gentry Underwood and his firm had seen attention from the like of Yahoo who may have wanted the startup as a way to refresh their Yahoo Mail and mobile services. However it seems that Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi’s Dropbox won out because of the many benefits they had to offer the startup.
Dropbox’s acquisition of the mobile mail startup and other previous buyouts are pointing at the future cloud based service provider. The company is looking to make its presence felt on mobile devices with cloud services. Mailbox would be the email side, while Audiogalaxy would provide a music service. Another acquisition named Snapjoy can handle pictures while tablet advertising startup TapEngage rounds off the a strong mobile service from Dropbox.
Dropbox’s ambitions were on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona when CEO Drew Houston gave a keynote address and recommended that carriers and manufacturers get in touch with the company to see what they could offer. He stated that, “If we’re not already working together, we’d love to work with you.” He also added that in 2012, Dropbox got most of its subscribers from mobile platforms. The company now has 100 million subscribers who upload about 1 billion files every day from 500 million devices.
The recent spat of acquisitions from Dropbox will also help it secure the future. Currently its subscribers are paying for cloud storage eventually the company will need to offer more to keep its customers and compete against firms like Google, Apple and Microsoft. Another competitor named Box is also on the look out for mobile cloud services and is testing out services that resemble Google Docs.
Source: TechCrunch, TechCrunch
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