Dropbox Inc. is expected to hire Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as lead adviser on its potential initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
The file-sharing company is working with Goldman Sachs to prepare documents for an IPO that could be filed as soon as this year, the people said, asking not to be identified as the details aren’t public. Dropbox has also held talks with JPMorgan Chase & Co. about a role on the listing, though no banks have yet been officially mandated, the people said.
No final decisions have been made and Dropbox may choose not to go forward with the IPO process. Goldman Sachs has previously advised the company on a credit line as well as earlier funding rounds, the people said.
Representatives for Dropbox, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan declined to comment.
After its founding in 2007, Dropbox gained a loyal following from people looking to store photos and other files in the cloud, making them available from any computer or mobile device. It rode this wave to a $10 billion valuation in early 2014, making it one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable unicorn startups.
The company’s chief executive officer and co-founder, Drew Houston, said in April that the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a key metric that investors will watch as the software maker moves closer to becoming a public company.
"It’s rare for software companies to be operating at our scale with our level of profitability and to be growing at the rate that we are," Houston said in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the time.
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