Dropbox, a cloud computing storage company, has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering. People familiar with the matter confirmed this news, asking not to be identified as the filing wasn’t public. Dropbox hired Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to manage the U.S. offering. The company is also in talks with other banks this month to fill additional roles related to the IPO.
The cloud storage company is planning to list in the first half of this year. This listing would be one of the first high profile tech listings of 2018, subsequent to Snap, the tech company that had a disappointing IPO in 2017. While Uber, another high profile and popular tech company, is not expected to go public until 2019.
Although the financial details of Dropbox are not yet disclosed publicly, the company announced in January 2017, that they were on track to make $1 billion on an annualized rate. According to CEO Drew Houston, who made a statement in June 2016, Dropbox was “cash flow positive,” which is considered to be a very important measure of financial health, although it’s not the same as the net profitability of a business. He also said that the company has been profitable, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
For some time now, Dropbox has been considered a hot IPO prospect on Wall Street, considering that the company has $1 billion in annualized sales, which explains why Goldman and J.P Morgan have been behind this deal since July 2017. The two banks have a prior working history with Dropbox. Goldman Sachs consulted the company on its previous funding rounds and also extended the company credit. Last year, J.P. Morgan led a $600 million credit line to Dropbox.
Once the IPO goes public, Dropbox will be one of the largest U.S. enterprise technology companies to list itself domestically in the last few years. In 2015, First Data Corp., went public at a market value of around $14 billion, which was the biggest IPO within five years.
Representatives from Dropbox, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan declined to comment.
