Dropbox to acquire DocSend for £118 million

Dropbox announced today it will acquire DocSend, a secure document sharing and analytics company with over 17,000 customers, for $165 million (£118 million).

Organisations that use Dropbox will now be able to use Docsend to deliver proposals and track engagement. Through this service, users can share documents easily and securely and customise who has access to them.

Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston said that the plan is to package together Dropbox, DocSend, and HelloSign - which Dropbox bought for $230m in 2019 - as an “end-to-end suite” of products spanning collaboration, sharing, and e-signatures.

"DocSend is a perfect complement to our product roadmap and we’re thrilled to welcome them to our team," Houston said.

“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.”

Russ Heddleston, DocSend co-founder and CEO, had interned at Dropbox over a decade ago before their paths crossed again in 2019 when the two companies became extension partners.

Heddlestone said: “As we’ve grown, we’ve realized 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.”

This is the first acquisition the company has announced since declaring its shift to a remote working strategy. It had reported a “one-off” loss of $398.2 million in its fourth-quarter report last year as the company made a decision to sublease most of its office space.

Following that decision, Dropbox announced on Monday that the building it was leasing as its headquarters in San Francisco would be sold for $1.08 billion. According to Kilroy Realty Corporation, its owner, this was a new high in the San Francisco commercial real estate market, as reported by Yahoo! Finance.