Dropbox Passes 100 Million Users

Dropbox, the online storage company, said Tuesday that it had surpassed 100 million users.

The company said it quadrupled its user base in the last year, and it attributed its rapid growth to more consumers and small businesses porting their personal and professional files to the Internet.

“Even 100 million is still at a single dot percentage of the people we could reach,” said Drew Houston, one of the founders of the company, in an interview.

The milestone is an important one for the start-up, which is aiming to stay neck-and-neck with technology juggernauts like Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft that are ramping up their own cloud storage offerings. Apple alone said recently that it has 190 million users of its online storage service, iCloud.

But Mr. Houston said the company was not worried about the competition.

“Those companies are busy trying to build something we had four years ago,” he said. “We're out front. We're already out there and building smaller features and things. All those other companies have turf to protect, and they're fighting a battle on a totally different front.”

Dropbox's main goal, he said, was to offer people a service that lets them save any file from anywhere, regardless of “the logo on the back of the computer or device,” and access it from anywhere, whenever they need it.

Dropbox has had several security skirmishes in the last year, including a breach that caused some users to received spammy messages. But Mr. Houston said the company had added features to prevent future discrepancies and insisted that the glitches had not deterred people from signing up or storing their personal files with the service.

“If anything, people are only putting more in there than they were six months ago,” he said. Each day, Dropbox users store more than 1 billion items in its service, said Mr. Houston.

“That's more tweets than are on Twitter,” he said . “We're talking Libraries of Congress every day.”

Last year, the company raised a staggering $250 million in venture capital, which lifted the company's valuation to $4 billion, making it one of the hotter properties in Silicon Valley, along with Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb and Square.