US-based start-up success story Dropbox has acquired online photo library Snapjoy for an undisclosed sum, less than one week after its acqui-hire of music streaming service Audiogalaxy.
Dropbox, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2007 by university graduates Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi.
After being forced to work from multiple computers, Houston was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments.
He created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow student Ferdowsi, who dropped out of university one semester before graduating to work on the venture.
After securing seed funding from Y Combinator, Houston and Ferdowsi focused on building a world-class engineering team.
In 2008, Sequoia Capital led a $7.2 million Series A funding round with Accel Partners to help bring Dropbox to the market.
Then in October last year, Dropbox raised $250 million from investors including Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.
Now the company has acquired Colorado-based start-up Snapjoy – another Y Combinator graduate – which allows users to import photos from anywhere and organise them in one place.
The acquisition comes less than one week after Dropbox acqui-hired Washington-based start-up Audiogalaxy, which lets users stream their music everywhere.
Both Colorado and Washington have been identified as key emerging start-up hubs in the US, as detailer by Australian entrepreneur Simon Walker in the Leeap Project.
The financial terms of both deals remain undisclosed. As is the norm with talent buyouts, the Audiogalaxy team is joining Dropbox but Audiogalaxy will no longer accept new signups.
Nevertheless, the Audiogalaxy founders said in a blog post they are “thrilled” to announce the acquisition.
The founders of Snapjoy, Michael Dwan and JP Ren, have also expressed their excitement over being acquired by Dropbox.
“As a fellow Y Combinator company, we’ve always admired Dropbox and loved their product. From the moment we met the founders, it was clear we shared a common goal,” Dwan and Ren said in a blog post.
“By combining forces with their amazing team, we can leverage the technology and scale of their platform and focus on what matters – delivering an incredible photo experience to over 100 million people. So what happens next? First and foremost, don’t worry – your photos are safe!
“Though we won’t be accepting new signups, existing users can continue to use Snapjoy to share and enjoy photos just as you do now.”
