Cloud storage pioneer Dropbox has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to a report, after a few years after its last funding round valued the company at $10 billion.
Bloomberg reported Thursday that Dropbox had filed for an IPO using the Securities and Exchange Commission’s confidential reporting system, which allows Dropbox to submit its initial income statements and balance sheets to the SEC without letting the public pore all over the details. It also allows Dropbox to wait until it’s truly ready before listing its shares, as opposed to the regular process, where the clock starts once the S-1 filing hits the internet.
Dropbox, which gives companies and individual users a cloud-based portal for sharing files and documents, would join rival Box as a public company once the filing actually goes public. Box has struggled to achieve profitability since its 2015 IPO, but Dropbox is said to be profitable already and on a rate to do $1 billion in revenue, according to Bloomberg.
Dropbox is also interesting because of its decision to move off public cloud services two years ago and onto its own data center infrastructure, one of the first startups built on Amazon Web Services to do so. Completing such an expensive project without public financing suggests that Dropbox might be in a stronger financial position than some of its competitors once its books are open to the public.
The company is expected to formally submit its IPO filing before the end of the second quarter, according to Bloomberg.
