Dropbox Gets Bigger and Bigger

As tech CEOs are wont to do when they have assembled journalists for an announcement, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston rattled off several data points about his company’s growth on Wednesday at an event to introduce the company’s new business-centric cloud storage offering. Among the facts and figures, two stood out: Dropbox now has 200 million users, Houston said, and over four million businesses are using it in some way.

That’s tremendous growth for a company that Houston cofounded in 2008 in order to make it easier to work anywhere without having to rely on remembering to bring a thumb drive. A year ago, the company had 100 million users and it figured there were then over two million businesses using it. These days, Houston said, more than 97 percent of the Fortune 500 are on Dropbox (though, this likely includes rogue employees whose IT departments haven’t officially sanctioned their use of the service).

The event was staged to unveil a change to the company’s Dropbox for Business service, which now allows workers to easily sync both their company and personal Dropbox folders on the same computer. Previously that involved having to log out of one account and log back in with another.

The move makes a lot of sense. If the company wants to keep growing, it has to keep innovating. The timing couldn’t have been better: at the same time, Amazon was introducing a competing enterprise service called Amazon WorkSpaces at its Amazon Web Services conference, AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.