O’Melveny on board as RIT invests in filesharer Dropbox
O’Melveny & Myers has won a role on popular digital filesharing business Dropbox’s latest major fundraising, aimed at allowing the Californian upstart to compete with Apple and Google in the cloud computing sphere.
The US firm is acting for an investor controlled by investment banker Sir Jacob Rothschild, the only major UK investor in the latest funding round.
The process, now at the second round of funding, has already raised $250m (£156m) in new funding and values the cloud service provider at $4bn. The funding is significantly bigger than the $1.2m in seed funding and the $6m the company received from the first fundraising round from investors Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.
Lead investor in the latest process was private equity company Index Ventures and included investments from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners.
O’Melveny’s London team acted for London Stock Exchange-listed RIT (previously the Rothschild Investment Trust) the only UK investor in a headline group led by US and Geneva-based operation Index.
The O’Melveny team was led by corporate partner John Van de North, a US-qualified lawyer who joined the firm from Kirkland & Ellis’s City practice in 2008.
RIT is a longstanding client of the firm, which advised the investment vehicle on its joint venture with Chinese investor Creat and adviser Quercus Ventures earlier this year.
Dropbox has said it would put the funding towards new acquisitions, strategic partnerships, products, hiking staff numbers and an office move.
