Dropbox says no immediate IPO plan

Cloud storage firm Dropbox, one of the best-known Silicon Valley startups, has no imminent plans for a public share offering, founder and chief executive Drew Houston said Monday.

"We don't have any plans right now," Houston said during a question-and-answer session at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

"We raised some money at the end of last year. We're really enjoying having that flexibility."

Dropbox, a popular application which allows individuals and businesses to access documents, photos and data from multiple devices, has a valuation estimated at some $10 billion, according to the research firm CB Insights.

Speculation has been swirling around an initial public offering (IPO) by Dropbox for months, fueled in part by the hiring of chief financial officer Vanessa Wittman, who was a key executive at Motorola Mobility.

But enthusiasm over Dropbox may be cooled by the experience of rival storage firm Box, which went public in January.

After an initial jump, Box's share price has fallen below its IPO price of $14 a share, amid intensive competition in cloud computing from Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others.

Dropbox, launched in 2007, has some 400 million users worldwide including some 130,000 companies which pay for enterprise services.