Dropbox Has Quietly Acquired Parastructure, A Big Data Startup In Stealth
Dropbox has been acquiring companies to help it expand the services that it can offer to consumers and enterprises beyond cloud storage. But the company — which has raised $1.1 billion and is among …
Context & Ripple Effects
Parastructure is not an isolated deal — it is the sixth acquisition TechCrunch and peers have logged from Dropbox this year, following workplace chat startup Zulip, the Readmill acqui-hire, Hackpad and Loom, and messaging startup Droptalk just eleven days earlier. What distinguishes Parastructure is its category: a big data startup, bought while still in stealth, rather than a consumer-facing app.
That matters because Dropbox has confirmed it is acquiring to expand beyond cloud storage into broader consumer and enterprise services — a push that sits atop the infrastructure ambitions signaled back when the company leased a large San Francisco office in 2011 with plans to grow well past 400 employees. A big data team suggests the storage company is building analytics capability of its own rather than licensing it.
First-order effects
- Dropbox gains an in-house big data engineering team at a moment when its $1.1 billion in raised capital is funding a rapid build-out of services beyond file sync.
Second-order effects
- Competing cloud storage and collaboration vendors face pressure to match Dropbox's cadence of capability acquisitions or concede ground on the enterprise features buyers increasingly bundle with storage.
Third-order effects
- If the 2014 pattern holds, cloud storage becomes the entry product in a broader platform contest where analytics and workflow capabilities — assembled largely through acqui-hires — determine which providers win enterprise accounts.
The trend: Cloud storage leaders are using aggressive tuck-in acquisitions to convert single-purpose sync products into multi-service platforms aimed at enterprise budgets.