Dropbox acquires document sharing platform DocSend for $165M

Dropbox has announced plans to acquire DocSend, a secure document sharing and tracking platform, in an all-cash deal worth $165 million.

Founded out of San Francisco in 2013, DocSend helps businesses bypass cumbersome email attachments through a link-based document sharing approach. This enables companies to control file downloads and deactivate access at any time while also gleaning real-time engagement insights. Moreover, the DocSend platform allows companies to ensure that the version of a file they have shared remains up to date.

Dropbox has been doubling down on its enterprise focus of late and pushing tighter integrations with other business-focused services, including Salesforce. Last year, Dropbox unveiled a partnership with Google to allow G Suite users to store their files in Dropbox. DocSend actually represents the company’s second acquisition in as many years, after it shelled out $230 million for e-signature startup HelloSign in 2019.

DocSend and HelloSign are both concerned with the remote management and distribution of documents — in fact, DocSend already offers built-in e-signature functionality. Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston said in a press release that the plan is to package Dropbox, DocSend, and HelloSign together as an “end-to-end suite” of products spanning collaboration, sharing, and e-signatures to help businesses “manage critical document workflows from start to finish.”

It’s becoming clear that Dropbox has access to the data it needs to determine which products in its ecosystem are most valuable as fully integrated features. Dropbox has offered an integration with DocSend since 2019, after expanding its extensions program to support numerous business apps. The extensions program originally launched in 2018 with integrations that included HelloSign, a startup Dropbox snapped up just two months later.

DocSend already claims some 17,000 customers, including a number of notable enterprise clients, such as Airtable and Gartner, which could give Dropbox an easier inroad as it looks to cross-sell and upsell its suite of products.

Nothing much will change for DocSend until the acquisition closes later this month, and Dropbox hasn’t confirmed what will happen to DocSend as a standalone product post-acquisition.

“Our goal is to accelerate adding value through additional DocSend functionality as well as deeper integrations with Dropbox,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat. “We’ll have more to share in the future.”