LIBOX - Your Media. Your way. Home - Online backup, file sync and sharing made easy. Dropbox Raises $250M In Funding, Boasts 45 Million Users. We knew it was in the works, and now Dropbox has confirmed that it has raised a massive round of funding. The company has landed $250 million in Series B financing (bringing its total of capital raised to $257.2 million). Last we heard the round values Dropbox at $4 billion. Index Ventures led the round, with participation from a stellar list of new investors (Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners).
Early backers Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round. Founded in 2007, Dropbox was initially jump-started at Y Combinator. Update: they reportedly turned down Apple, and Steve Jobs himself, who wanted to buy Dropbox for a ‘nine-digit’ sum, back in late 2009. Dropbox says it now has more than 45 million users saving one billion files every three days, and that it is poised to triple its user base this year.
Simplenote. An easy way to keep notes, lists, ideas, and more. Box.net CEO Aaron Levie On His Love-Hate Affair With Microsoft. Aaron Levie, the 26-year-old founder of enterprise cloud startup Box.net, always has something to say. He's as witty as he is garrulous, rarely hesitating before catapulting into an answer. He ties his sentences together with an endless string of semicolons, seemingly, with a millisecond pause here or there to cram in reflexive discourse particles--so-yeah-so! Or no-but-wait! --as if he speaks with a stutter but without impediment. But when it came to the question "What do you like about Microsoft," the college dropout was speechless. "Wait, wait, could you rephrase that? " For Levie, Microsoft is both a competitor and an inspiration, the business equivalent of a mortal enemy's picture tacked to a dartboard.
The startup is gaining on its competitor, though, growing Box's user base to 7 million, and winning 100,000 business clients, among them such big names as Dell, T-Mobile, and P&G. Of the new funding, Levie said, in character, "It's an $80 million round--wait, really?