Dropbox makes Paper generally available and hits billion-dollar revenue milestone

(c)iStock.com/KIVILCIM PINAR

Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced two new products focusing on cross-platform storage and collaboration, as well as revealing it has become the fastest software as a service (SaaS) vendor to hit the $1 billion revenue run rate threshold.

According to various reports, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the financial milestone at an event in San Francisco earlier this week. Fastest of course does not mean first; the company has a way to go before it catches up with the likes of Salesforce, who announced its first billion-dollar quarter back in 2013, but Dropbox becomes one of only five companies to achieve the feat.

The new products, as detailed in a company blog post, are Smart Sync – formerly Dropbox Infinite – which aims to provide the industry’s first on-demand, cross-platform cloud storage offering, and the long trailed general availability of Dropbox Paper, a collaborative tool which was launched in open beta as far back as August.

“We’re redesigning Dropbox to be fundamentally designed for teams,” said Houston in a statement. “We’re reinventing sync, bringing a modern collaboration experience to all your files, and launching Paper, a new way to work together that goes beyond the document…and we’re building this all on top of a strong business foundation.”

Dropbox said users in more than 200 countries and territories had created documents in Paper, totalling in the millions, while the product was in beta. Other recently released features in Paper include a presentation mode, improved search functionality, and mobile folder functionality on iOS and Android. With Smart Sync, Dropbox ‘becomes a centrally manageable, secure hub for teams to work together on all their files,’ according to the press materials.

“Team members gain full visibility and unprecedented access to their entire Dropbox right from their desktop file system, no matter how large,” the company added.

According to Business Insider, Dropbox is ‘not in any rush’ to go public; the company continues to be at the forefront of articles of rumoured 2017 IPOs. Dropbox was ranked as the second most influential private company leading cloud computing last year by Forbes, behind Slack and ahead of DocuSign.