Dropbox Raises $500m In Finance Ahead Of Big Productivity Announcement

Dropbox has raised over $500 million [£300 million] in debt financing ahead of a busy week for the company that could define the storage startup’s immediate future.

The Financial Times reports that the new credit facility deal was led by J.P. Morgan and the publication stated that the cash will be used to develop its own data centre infrastructure in order to move away from its current hybrid of its own and Amazon’s capacity.

Another source, quoted by Re/code, mentions that the money has actually been brought on board to be applied to the firm’s general business and has been injected “on good terms”.

The same site adds that Dropbox will launch a handful of new products at a press event that is rumoured to be taking place on Wednesday and the plans are expected to focus on productivity, something that will bring it in line with its competitors.

GigaOm Research also speculates that the press event will see it rework the recently acquired Zulia chat app to provide a “Yammer-like experience for small workgroups.” It could also choose to debut an application in order to edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents that will run browser only before being upgraded for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android at a later date.

Dropbox is part of a cloud storage industry that is currently seeing fierce competition when it comes to prices. The market leader in Amazon Web Services cut its storage service prices by an average of 51 per cent and this was preceded by Google Drive dropping its storage prices by an average of 68 per cent.