14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox is said to be forced to live with only a $4 billion valuation, while previous figures were between $5 billion and as much as $10 billion. Apparently, Dropbox only wanted the money from particular investors, so it had to drop the valuation to secure their participation.
Regardless, it's a huge bump over previous figures and it's quite a large sum for a company that is only said to be making several tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue.
TechCrunch reports that Dropbox is very close to finalizing the investment deal which will value the company at $4 billion.
There's no word on how much Dropbox is raising, but previous figures were in the range of $200 million to $300 million.
Still, when Dropbox started talking about an investment round, earlier this summer, people were willing to value it at $8 billion, a big number considering that Twitter is worth as much.
It may be that these investors simply threw numbers around, but had no big intentions of actually investing in the company.
What's more, the poor financial climate and the market tanking left investors uneasy about pouring that kind of money into Dropbox.
Dropbox was also picky about who it wanted as investors, so it's now left with $4 billion. Index Ventures is leading the round, apparently, with others contributing.
Dropbox offers its service for free, but users only get 2 GB of cloud storage. If you want more, you have to pay up.
That is Dropbox's only revenue stream so far and earlier estimates said the company was set to make in the order of $100 million this year.
But newer numbers are much lower, $30 million in revenue in 2011. There's no solid confirmation of that though, so everyone is still left guessing.