Dropbox CEO and Co-Founder Drew Houston (Photo : Reuters)
California-based file hosting company Dropbox is adding another company to its list of acquisitions as it acquired the Israel-based mobile productivity startup CloudOn, ZDNET reported. No formal announcement was made coming from Dropbox Inc. though the acquisition was confirmed by CloudOn and is already posted on their website.
This move by Dropbox, joining forces with the leading company for mobile document creation and editing, is said to be a stepping stone in expanding its services away from file hosting.
CloudOn, which claims to have over nine million users that edited more than 90 million documents, will be shutting down its services on March 15 and will no longer accept new users. The start-up company, which employs 30 engineers, is initially focused on editing MS office documents though it continued changing its users' way of organizing, creating and editing documents in the last three years on all platforms.
The deal, which terms were not officially disclosed but said to be the largest acquisition in terms of staff numbers, between these two companies will give Dropbox an edge in challenging Microsoft and other tech giants, over other start-up rivals such Quip, Box.com and Evernote.
Currently, the cloud storage provider, which has over 300 million users, operates its offices in Dublin, Tokyo and Sidney. With the CloudOn acquisition, Dropbox will surely benefit as they will get more talented people and a new Middle East hub to use. Since they are rapidly growing outside the U.S., wherein they have an estimated 70 percent of users according to Tech Crunch, the storage company is really eager to gobble up start-up companies to expand in the international market.
Other companies acquired by Dropbox were Mailbox, supercomputing service provider PiCloud, note taking app Hackpad, messaging startup Droptalk, photo storage Snapjoy, Loom and Auidogalaxy.
