Contact: Scott Denne Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Dropbox prints another collaboration deal, this time picking up CloudOn, a service for creating, editing and sharing Word, PDF and other documents over the Internet. The purchase comes just two months after a Faustian pact with Microsoft to completely integrate Office with Dropbox.
Today’s transaction appears to be larger than most Dropbox tuck-ins. The target raised $26m in venture funding and had about 50 employees. The deal (and the Microsoft partnership) highlight Dropbox’s efforts to build out collaboration and workflow tools to appeal to business customers, particularly SMBs. And with it, Dropbox continues a streak it began last year of nabbing collaboration tools and teams to add to its core sync and share offering.
A year or two ago, CloudOn would have been seen as a legitimate competitor to Dropbox. No longer. Now it’s time for consolidation as Dropbox and soon-to-be-public Box reach for the startups with the coolest features and functions.
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