http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/15/4110532/dropbox-reportedly-paid-around-100-million-for-mailbox
Today Dropbox announced that it has acquired email app Mailbox, just one month after the app hit the market to much critical acclaim. "Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together," Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood wrote in a blog post. "To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen."
All 14 members of the Mailbox team will join Dropbox, The Wall Street Journal reports. No price tag has yet been attached to the deal, though Mailbox (formerly Orchestra to-do) has $5.3 million in venture capital behind it. Mailbox will continue as a "stand-alone app," while Dropbox will use some of the company's technology to enhance its own features. "The deal came together after the companies started talking about email attachments a few months ago," the WSJ reports.
"Like many of you, when we discovered Mailbox we fell in love-it was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered," Dropbox CEO Drew Houston wrote in a blog post. "Many have promised to help us with our overflowing inboxes, but the Mailbox team actually delivered... Whether it's your Dropbox or your Mailbox, we want to find ways to simplify your life." Email is among the first of presumably many places where Dropbox might step outside its comfort zone of cloud storage and file-sharing.
One reason Dropbox may have been interested in Mailbox is because people often use Dropbox instead of attaching large files to emails. Gmail recently rolled out a feature that lets users attach files to emails seamlessly using Google Drive, which arguably reduces the usefulness of Dropbox since you have to visit another site to access your files. While there are no signs that Dropbox will announce its own email service, receiving Dropbox attachments inside messages from Mailbox users could be both smart and easy marketing. Or maybe Dropbox is just eager to bring new, design-focused, cloud-centric companies into the fold.
Earlier this morning the creators of the popular Gmail client Mailbox announced they'd been purchased by Dropbox, but the financial details were a mystery. According to recent reports, however, Dropbox may have paid in the neighborhood of $100 million for the app. GigaOm is reporting that its sources say that Dropbox paid more than $50 million for Orchestra, the company behind Mailbox, with another clarifying that the number was actually much closer to $100 million. Those figures match up with what TechCrunch is hearing as well, with that publication's sources saying the deal was worth nearly $100 million in cash and stock. GigaOm also reports that both Yahoo and Facebook had been talking to the Mailbox team about a possible acquisition deal — though obviously neither emerged as victors. It's still unclear what Dropbox's larger plans for the Mailbox app are, but the company's already teasing potential file attachment integration with Dropbox's own services.