Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.

[13] Dropbox has experienced criticism and generated controversy for issues including security breaches and privacy concerns.

[14] Dropbox brings files together in one central place by creating a special folder on the user's computer.

Both Mailbox and Carousel were shut down in December 2015, with key features from both apps implemented into the regular Dropbox service.

[20] Houston founded Evenflow, Inc. in May 2007[21] as the company behind Dropbox, and shortly thereafter secured seed funding from Y Combinator.

[33] The following December, Dropbox acquired two companies; Audiogalaxy, a startup "allowing users to store their music files and playlists in the cloud then stream them to any device",[34] and Snapjoy, a company that allowed users to "aggregate, archive and view all of their digital photos from their cameras, phones and popular apps like Flickr, Instagram and Picasa, and then view them online or via an iOS app".

[36] In May 2014, Dropbox acquired Bubbli, a startup that has "built some innovative ways of incorporating 3D technology into 2D views, and packaging it in a mobile app".

[37][38] In January 2015, Dropbox acquired CloudOn, a company that provided mobile applications for document editing and creation.

[40] In April 2014, Dropbox acquired photo-sharing company Loom (which would be shut down and integrated with the then-recently announced Carousel),[41] and document-sharing startup Hackpad.

[52][53] In January 2021, Dropbox CEO Houston announced the layoff of 315 employees, which is approximately 11 percent of the current workforce.

[65] In August 2015, Dropbox announced the availability of "Universal 2nd Factor" USB security keys, providing two-factor authentication for logging into its services.

[13] In October 2008, Dropbox raised a $6 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Accel.

[26][68] A May 2010 report in The Wall Street Journal said that "since [founder Drew Houston] started reading Eric Ries' Lean startup blog about a year ago, the company has started trickling out new features when they are ready instead of waiting to launch a fully featured product.

[27] In April 2012, Dropbox announced that Bono and The Edge, two members of the Irish rock band U2, were individual investors in the company.

[72] In March 2017, Bloomberg reported that Dropbox had secured a US$600 million credit line, with the company expected to file for its initial public offering (IPO) "as soon as this year".

[82] Dropbox Business is Dropbox's application for corporations, adding more business-centered functionality for teams, including collaboration tools, advanced security and control, unlimited file recovery, user management and granular permissions, and options for unlimited storage.

[92] In July 2016, Dropbox announced a new "AdminX" administrator dashboard for Business customers, offering improved control of company files and users.

[93][94] In June 2017, the AdminX dashboard was given a redesign and additional administrator functions, such as log-in durations, custom password strength parameters, and setting specific subdomain verifications for individual teams.

[100][101] On July 10, 2018, Dropbox announced its partnership with Salesforce aiming to improve brand engagement and team productivity.

[106] LAN Sync discovers other peers on the same network via UDP port 17500 using a proprietary discovery protocol[107] developed by early Dropbox engineer Paul Bohm in 2010.

[10] Dropbox originally used Amazon's S3 storage system to store user files, but between 2014 and 2016 they gradually moved away from Amazon to use their own hardware, referred to as "Magic Pocket", due to Dropbox's description as "a place where you keep all your stuff, it doesn't get lost, and you can always access it".

[109] In June 2017, the company announced a major global network expansion, aiming to increase synchronization speeds while cutting costs.

In a blog post, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi explained that "We'll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live – in the Dropbox app.

[128][19][129] Dropbox Paper entered open beta in August 2016, allowing anyone to join and test the product.

[146] Apple launched its own cloud storage service later in 2011, iCloud, but this did not hold back Dropbox's growth.

[149][150] Dropbox has been the subject of criticism and controversy related to multiple incidents, including a June 2011 authentication problem that let accounts be accessed for several hours without passwords;[151] a July 2011 Privacy Policy update with language suggesting Dropbox had ownership of users' data;[152] concerns about Dropbox employee access to users' information;[153] July 2012 email spam[154] with recurrence in February 2013;[155] leaked government documents in June 2013 with information that Dropbox was being considered for inclusion in the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program;[156][157] a July 2014 comment from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticizing Dropbox's encryption keys being available to employees;[158] the leak of 68 million account passwords on the Internet in August 2016;[159][160] and a January 2017 accidental data restoration incident where years-old supposedly deleted files reappeared in users' accounts.

[163] The Dropbox headquarters, located in San Francisco, were originally on Market Street, until its expansion to the China Basin Landing building in July 2011, allowing for a significant space increase.

[164] As the number of employees grew, the company again needed expansion,[165] and in February 2014, it signed a lease for two buildings on Brannan Street.