Dropbox sees $648-million IPO price between $16 and $18 per share

Data-sharing business Dropbox Inc on Monday filed for an initial public offering of 36 million shares, giving the company a value of more than $7 billion at the high end of the pricing range.

A series of funding rounds had valued Dropbox at $10 billion, but investment bankers were doubtful about matching that valuation.

Dropbox, which plans to raise $648 million at the top end of the range, expects its debut price to be between $16 and $18 per share, the company said in a filing. 

The venture capital arm of Salesforce.com Inc has agreed to buy $1 million of Dropbox's Class A common stock in a private placement at a price per share equal to the IPO.

Dropbox along with music streaming service company Spotify are the year's two most anticipated tech IPOs.

San Francisco-based Dropbox, which started as a free service to share and store photos, music and other large files, competes with much larger technology firms such as Alphabet Inc's Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc as well as cloud-storage rival Box Inc.

In its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Dropbox reported 2017 revenue of $1.11 billion, up 31 percent from $844.8 million, a year earlier.

The company's net loss narrowed to $111.7 million in 2017 from $210.2 million in 2016.

Dropbox, which has 11 million paying users across 180 countries, said that about half of its 2017 revenue came from customers outside the United States.

Goldman Sachs & Co, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank Securities, BofA Merrill Lynch are the lead underwriters for the public offer.