Dropbox finally filed for its IPO — and it lost $111 million on revenue of $1.1 billion last year (BOX, TEAM)

Drew Houston

Dropbox just filed for its initial public offering and will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol DBX.
The S-1 form Dropbox filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that the company lost $111 million on revenue of $1.1 billion last year.
This makes Dropbox the first of the many high-valued tech "unicorns" expected to file to go public in 2018.
Dropbox was last valued at $10 billion in a 2014 venture-capital round.

The file-sharing company Dropbox filed its S-1 form on Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, meaning one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in tech is well on its way.

Dropbox, founded in 2007, posted revenue of about $1.1 billion last year, up 31% from $844.8 million in 2016. But the company still isn't profitable, according to the filing.

The bright side is that the company's losses have also decreased over the past three years.

Dropbox saw losses of $111.7 million last year — an improvement from a loss of $210.2 million it showed in 2016 and of $325.9 million in 2015. The company also reported $305 million in positive free cash flow last year.

The San Francisco-based Dropbox has been expected to go public since news reports surfaced last year that it had retained Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to work on the offering, which the S-1 form appears to confirm.

Dropbox, which was last valued at $10 billion in a 2014 venture-capital round, will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol DBX. The initial stock price is likely to be set closer to the date it debuts on the markets, which is still unclear.

The company will sell shares in a three-class structure — the same one Snap used when it went public last year. Class C shareholders won't have any voting power at the company, whereas Class A shareholders will have one vote and Class B shareholders will have 10.

Dropbox competes with Box and Atlassian, two business-software companies valued on the public markets at $3.2 billion and $12.4 billion as of Friday afternoon.

Here's Business Insider talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston in June, not long before IPO rumors began to swirl: