Dropbox, now at 300 million users globally, says that there are 4 million businesses today using its cloud-based platform to store, distribute and share documents. But of those, only around 80,000 have opted so far to use Dropbox for Business, the company’s premium enterprise tier launched earlier this year. Today, the startup is making a move to sweeten the deal, unveiling a host of new features to enhance Dropbox for Business. They include a lot of new (and more secure) ways to share documents, and an interesting move that points to Dropbox’s bigger platform ambitions: the introduction of full-text search.
It’s also adding two new APIs for developers to have more flexible ways to show documents to users. There are currently over 300,000 apps that integrate the Dropbox cloud platform, according to Ilya Fushman, the company’s head of product.
The moves come as Dropbox, now valued at around $10 billion, is tipped as an IPO candidate. It’s not clear whether Dropbox is currently profitable, but boosting paying subscribers — Business it Dropbox’s highest service tier and costs $15 per user per month at a minimum of five users — will undoubtedly help the company firm up its bottom line as it gears up for an IPO and seeks to avoid the fate of Box, whose own public offering has been delayed.
Another interesting scaling move: the company is now focusing on opening and ramping up a new international headquarters in London. Fushman, who I met in London earlier this week along with Dropbox’s EMEA head Johann Butting, tells me that international accounts for 70% of Dropbox’s business, and Europe (despite some controversy) is the biggest part of that and around one-third of customers. The UK is the company’s number-two market after the U.S.
Here’s a rundown of the new features:
