Dive Brief:

• Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says his company should exceed $1 billion in revenue this year and is free-cash flow positive, which could bolster the company’s plans for a rumored 2017 IPO, according to TechCrunch and other sources.

• Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Houston also announced two new products — a file sync tool and a content collaboration tool that compares to Google Docs — as part of effort to attract more enterprise business.

• Dropbox says about 200,000 of its 500 million users are businesses, about double the number it reported two years ago. The company wants to increase that number even further.   

Dive Insight:

Some have questioned whether a company that offers a free file storage service can find enough paying customers to make a great business. But Dropbox garnered a broad support base at its inception, and appears able to continue to attract users better than its primary competitor, Box.

Dropbox is now reportedly two-and-a-half times the size of Box. And that’s despite the fact that Box aimed for the enterprise from the beginning, while Dropbox focused on the consumer market.

But Dropbox knows it needs paying enterprise customers to succeed, so it’s working to improve its appeal to the enterprise. In response, it’s focusing on new team collaboration tools. But Dropbox faces tough competition in that area from Box, Slack, Facebook, Microsoft, Atlassian and Google who effectively dominate the file sharing and collaboration market.