New York City | April 27 - May 1, 2013
Disrupt alumnus Dropbox made the second in a series of super-savvy, super-early stage acquisitions today, picking up hyped-up email management app Mailbox in an acquisition that we’re calling “DropMail.”
We had been hearing that Mailbox was raising money, piquing the interest of Andreessen Horowitz among others, which is why today’s news that the company sold to the harmoniously named Dropbox didn’t come as a surprise. Sometimes an acquisition is the easiest way to raise resources for growth — especially when you’re tackling as expensive a problem as email. And have a six-figure wait list.
And we’re hearing that this particular acquisition was not cheap — The post-pivot startup cost the storage company “well over” $50 million, according to multiple sources. And we’ve heard that that the price was around $100 million in cash and stock.
Yahoo had also made inroads with the email platform, founded by IDEO veteran Gentry Underwood, which makes sense considering the brand decline of Yahoo Mail as well as the latter company’s dismal mobile traction. But Dropbox’s allure and sympatico vision made more sense for the fledgling startup, whose impressive numbers gave co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi the courage to take a swing at email.
In any case, we can probably expect to see Dropbox handling email attachments real soon.
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a...
Mailbox, now a part of Dropbox, is a mobile-first inbox that makes processing messages on your phone fast and delightful. It’s how email on the phone should work: Mailbox checks your mail from the cloud and delivers it to your phone with lightning-fast speed. A colorful swipe-based UI makes processing easy, and the “snooze” feature lets you put off messages until later. Currently available for iPhone and Gmail. Mailbox makes getting to inbox zero - and staying there - a...
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