Elliott Management Holds Massive Dropbox Stake

Elliott Administration Corp. has taken a sizable stake in software enterprise Dropbox Inc., the newest goal for the activist hedge fund, according to people today common with the make a difference.

Elliott has explained to Dropbox it is the company’s most significant shareholder just after Main Govt Officer Drew Houston, the persons mentioned. That indicates the hedge fund owns a stake of a lot more than 10%, really worth effectively around $800 million. The two sides have been in talks since earlier this yr.

Dropbox, a cloud-computing company with a market benefit of about $11 billion, went public in March 2018 and has been buying and selling below its IPO value for most of that time. Its modest valuation compared with those people of other cloud corporations these types of as Salesforce.com Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. has designed it the topic of persistent takeover speculation.

That chatter intensified just after Salesforce agreed to obtain Slack Systems Inc. final 12 months for $27.7 billion. Other cloud providers have also gotten scooped up lately, like Cloudera Inc., which agreed to provide itself to a pair of personal-fairness companies previously this 7 days. Activist Carl Icahn is a major Cloudera shareholder.

Dropbox’s key providing is cloud-dependent storage, which lets users to shop paperwork, images and movies online. The organization also has an offering that will allow teams to edit centralized files. It also owns DocSend, bought in March, and HelloSign, which facilitates digital signatures.