Dropbox will be the first-ever startup from Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator to go public
- On Friday, Dropbox filed its S-1, making it the first among Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator's companies to ever file for an IPO.
- Y Combinator accepted Dropbox founder Drew Houston's application for Dropbox in 2007. It was the second time that Houston had applied to the program.
On Friday, file hosting service Dropbox filed its S-1, making it the first Y Combinator company to ever file for an IPO.
While the Silicon Valley-based incubator has overseen the development of several successful companies like, Airbnb, Docker, and Instacart, Dropbox will be the first within the Y Combinator program to go public.
Led by Sam Altman and founded by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell in 2005, Y Combinator quickly rose to prominence as a program for young startups to gain a network of investors and advisors, in addition to seed funding, in exchange for the incubator taking an equity stake. In December, Y Combinator announced plans for a development program for later-stage startups.
Dropbox founder Drew Houston applied twice to Y Combinator before the selective incubator accepted his application in the summer of 2007. While at Y Combinator, the startup attracted interest from tech elites like Michael Moritz, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs, who famously said the startup's core online storage offering was "a feature, not a product" and that Apple would destroy it.
The company's last valuation was at $10 billion in 2014. The initial offering price has yet to announced. The stock will be listed on the NASDAQ under the stock ticker DBX.