Dropbox gobbles up Mailbox owner Orchestra

Dropbox announced it will be acquiring Mailbox parent Orchestra, its first move acquiring a firm outside the cloud services sector. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Under terms of the deal, Orchestra's 13-person team will join Dropbox, but Mailbox will continue to operate as a separate app. "Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together. To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen," wrote the Mailbox team.

Mailbox is a mobile app email client that aims to simplify email management and is available for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and Gmail users. Users can swipe messages to prioritize and organize them into categories. The app is still currently in beta but has already amassed over 1.3 million reservations on its waiting list. "We are still struggling to keep up with the demand from those who want to use it," Orchestra CEO Gentry Underwood told the WSJ.

"Our goal is to put Mailbox in the hands of everyone who wants it. That means supporting additional email providers and mobile devices," wrote the Mailbox team. The Dropbox acquisition could speed up the process of rolling out the Mailbox app to more users on more devices.

"After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox--to solve life's hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day. We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain," wrote Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi.

Dropbox currently focuses on cloud file storage and touts over 100 million users worldwide.

For more:
- read this Dropbox blog post
- see this Mailbox blog post
- see this WSJ story

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