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The cloud service provider is expanding its reach in the online documents arena to compete with the likes of DocuSign and Box.
As we hit the one-year anniversary of the mass movement to remote working, virtual meetings and online activities, Dropbox has struck a multimillion-dollar deal to strengthen its market position when it comes to online documents.
The cloud service provider, which has more than 700m registered users across 180 countries, has agreed to acquire document sharing and analytics company DocSend for $165m. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of the company’s 2021 fiscal year.
Having acquired e-signature company HelloSign in 2019 for $230m, Dropbox is expanding its reach in the online documents arena as the need for digital tools continues to rise.
Based in San Francisco, DocSend was founded in 2013 and enables companies to share documents easily and offers real-time feedback.
Signed, sealed, delivered
In a blog post, Dropbox said DocSend’s customers can securely organise, manage and share their business-critical documents and content, while its analytics give users insights to better understand how viewers are engaging with their content.
According to Dropbox, this will give users “a layer of intelligence” on top of the scale and distribution of the Dropbox content platform. DocSend currently has more than 17,000 customers.
Dropbox’s co-founder and CEO, Drew Houston, described DocSend as the “perfect complement” to Dropbox’s products, offering an end-to-end workflow for managing documents.
“By bringing Dropbox, HelloSign and DocSend together, we’ll be able to offer a full suite of secure, self-serve products to help them manage critical document workflows from start to finish.”
DocSend co-founder and CEO, Russ Heddleston, added: “As we’ve grown, we’ve realised that the ability to securely share content and engage with documents after they are sent offers powerful benefits to a variety of customer segments.
“By joining Dropbox, we’ll be able to rapidly scale, bringing our vision and capabilities to the hundreds of millions of people around the world who already trust Dropbox with their most important content.”
Dropbox isn’t the only cloud storage provider looking to expand its market. In February, competitor Box struck a deal to buy e-signature start-up SignRequest for $55m.
