As the world transitioned to working remotely, more tech companies transitioned to using collaboration tools like Dropbox.
On Thursday, the San Francisco company reported its first profitable quarter since going public two years ago, citing the shift in distributed work for driving growth in all of its products.
At the end of its first fiscal quarter ended March 31, Dropbox reported $455 million in revenue, an 18 percent increase year over year. The company also saw a bump in paying users, up from 14.6 million this quarter compared to 13.2 million during the same time last year.
CEO Drew Houston said he thought good news for Dropbox was here to stay, forecasting that companies’ move to remote work and increased reliance on tools like Slack and Zoom would last beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s a little too early to tell to what extent this is a temporary surge versus a permanent uplift,” Houston said during the earnings call. “Certainly a huge percentage of the world is being forced into a remote work state for the first time. I think the effects of [COVID-19] will persist well beyond when we physically go back in the office.”
The company has also seen significantly higher usage in its HelloSign product in recent months, with a three-fold increase in signature requests, Houston said. Dropbox’s HelloWorks document workflow tool has also seen an uptick in new use cases related to the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.
He said lenders have used HelloWorks to send out “tens of thousands” of small business loan relief applications, and that an urgent care facility in New York relied on the product to process nearly 2,000 patient intake forms in April.
“Dropbox addresses the customers’ need for a HIPAA-compliant tool to enable collaboration among a highly distributed workforce,” Houston said.
Last year, Dropbox also launched a new desktop app, which integrates with tools like Zoom and Slack. The company said it now counts more than 350,000 business users of its desktop app and, over the past couple of months, reported that weekly active users in the app have increased 60 percent.
In Q1, Dropbox also added a feature that allows users to record Zoom calls and save the recording and transcript directly in the platform. Houston said this lets users safely share the recording with team members unable to attend the meeting. He also credited Dropbox’s text search feature — which allows employees to search for any phrase mentioned during a video conference — with also driving Zoom integrations up 2,000 percent since February.
“With the proliferation of all the different apps, more and more customers are turning to Dropbox for a platform agnostic solution that pulls it all together,” Houston said. “Bundled offerings tend to favor the tools within the suite. Our customers may be using something like [Microsoft] Office, but they’re often also using G-suite and tools like Slack and Zoom.”
