Sources: Dropbox Acqui-Hiring Social Reading App Readmill For $8 Million
With fresh capital in its coffers, Dropbox appears to be on somewhat of an acquisition spree, albeit a quiet one. Following the cloud storage company's recent purchase of workplace chat solution Zulip …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dropbox has been spending its February war chest quietly: it picked up workplace chat maker Zulip out of private beta earlier this month (its Zulip purchase), and sources now peg an $8 million acqui-hire of social reading app Readmill as the next move — though the deal remains unconfirmed by either company. The timing follows Dropbox's confirmed $350 million private round, raised partly against rival Box's planned IPO.
The Readmill rumor landed days after Dropbox confirmed it will let users separate work and personal accounts across devices starting next month, with a press event set for April 9th — a product cadence that suggests the spree is aimed at filling feature gaps rather than buying revenue. Pickup by App Advice and Gigaom's Laura Hazard Owen shows the story traveled despite the absence of any official word.
First-order effects
- Readmill's team joins Dropbox, while its users are left with an unconfirmed future for the reading app itself, since an $8 million price for a consumer product signals a talent buy rather than a business acquisition.
Second-order effects
- Small consumer startups building annotation, sharing, or sync layers around reading and documents gain a clearer exit path: with Dropbox flush from its $350 million round, sub-$10M talent acquisitions become a repeatable liquidity route without an IPO.
- Competitors like Box, whose planned IPO raise Dropbox's funding already exceeded, face pressure to show comparable product velocity — each quiet Dropbox pickup narrows the differentiation gap ahead of both companies' public-market pitches.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pre-IPO infrastructure companies will keep absorbing niche consumer apps for teams rather than products, consolidating the mobile reading-and-productivity layer into a handful of well-capitalized platforms.
The trend: Well-funded cloud storage platforms are quietly acqui-hiring small consumer apps for talent ahead of their public listings, turning sub-$10M deals into the default exit for niche startups.