Dropbox Acquires German Start-Up Boxcryptor

Blog by Dropbox team

At Dropbox, Inc. ensuring our customers’ content is secure is a top priority, and we’ve invested heavily in security programs that keep customer data safe. In today’s distributed work landscape, our customers and their teams are facing new security risks. According to Ernst & Young’s 2021 Global Information Security Survey, more than 3 in 4 (77%) respondents warn that they have seen an increase in the number of disruptive attacks following the Covid-19 pandemic. To that end, we’ve heard from our customers that encrypted file storage is increasingly valuable to them and their teams, and there’s heightened demand for built-in functionality and features to support this in the Dropbox experience.

We’ve signed an agreement to acquire several key assets from Boxcryptor (Secomba GmbH), a provider of end-to-end “zero-knowledge” encryption for cloud storage services, a start-up founded in 2011 with an unknown seed round raised on June 7, 2012. The combination of its encryption capabilities and Dropbox’s product, with our already security features, will help us better meet our customers’ evolving needs.

We know security is a top priority for our customers. It’s important that we offer features that are seamlessly built into our product so customers who want or need an end-to-end solution can safeguard their confidential information without compromising their user experience. We plan to embed Boxcryptor’s capabilities natively within Dropbox for our business users on our paid plans, adding an additional layer of security by encrypting files locally on their devices prior to syncing their content to Dropbox.

As we work towards our vision of creating one organized place for our customers’ cloud content and the workflows around it, we firmly believe that it’s critical that we invest in tools to ensure customers can protect their content however they choose. We look forward to being able to offer end-to-end zero-knowledge encryption so that our customers can focus on working and collaborating on Dropbox knowing their content is even more safe and secure.