Dropbox, the online file storage company, said on Monday that it hoped to raise as much as $648 million in its forthcoming stock market debut, setting up the final stage along its path to becoming the next big publicly traded Silicon Valley darling.
In an updated prospectus, Dropbox said that it planned to sell 36 million shares between $16 and $18 a share. At the midpoint of that range, the company would be valued at roughly $7.5 billion, factoring in restricted stock units and options. That is down from its most recent valuation of $10 billion from previous private investors.
As part of the initial offering, Salesforce’s venture arm has agreed to buy $100 million worth of Dropbox stock, Dropbox said in its prospectus.
Investors, analysts and — perhaps most importantly — other big privately held tech companies will be closely watching Dropbox’s initial public offering to see how interested investors are in the latest batch of so-called unicorns. Dropbox and Spotify, the music-streaming giant that is planning its own listing, could presage a series of stock market debuts, eventually including the likes of Uber and Airbnb.
The market for initial offerings this year is already proving robust, with 29 I.P.O.s having been held so far, up 61 percent from the same time last year, according to the advisory firm Renaissance Capital.
Monday’s filing precedes Dropbox’s show to pitch its offering to potential investors. As the company’s executives and their advisers begin to crisscross the country in a series of meetings, their goal is to convince would-be buyers that its stock will perform more like Facebook’s, which has risen enormously in recent years, and less like Snap Inc.’s, whose stock is down 34 percent since its debut.
Source: The New York Times
