Dropbox Paid Upward of $50 Million for Mailbox

When Dropbox announced Friday that it is acquiring Mailbox, terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it didn’t take long for them to leak out.

Sources familiar with the deal say it was a sizable one for such an early-stage outfit, with a price driven upward thanks to interest from some deep-pocketed companies. GigaOM and TechCrunch both claim that Mailbox was acquired for a price “well over” $50 million, with a significant chunk of stock that pushes it closer to $100 million. Here at AllThingsD, we’re hearing that’s generally accurate, but with a caveat: The stock consideration makes it tough to compute real value. “It’s somewhere in between,” another (cagey) source said of the deal.

That Dropbox was able to best such rivals in a bidding war is an impressive feat, and one that speaks to the company’s momentum and its valuation, which these days hovers between $4 billion and $5 billion. Not nearly as impressive a feat as the one Mailbox just pulled off by fetching well over $50 million for a nascent, unproven business, though.