Dropbox Acquires Israel-Based Mobile Productivity Startup CloudOn

Speaking to WSJ on Tuesday, Dropbox's Head of Product, Business and Mobile, Ilya Fushman, said that the more than 30 employees at CloudOn will join Dropbox and the firm's Israel office will become a base for the company's "aggressive hiring" in the region.

CloudOn, which is a developer of tools to simplify creating and editing documents on mobile devices, has about nine million users that rely on the service to edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents and other files on their mobile devices.

Starting Tuesday, CloudOn has stopped accepting new users and says its services will completely shutdown on March 15. CloudOn's engineering hub is in Herzliya, Israel, where the company had opened its first office about two years ago.

Fushman said that the CloudOn team is the largest number of employees Dropbox has added through an acquisition, and added that they will begin work on Dropbox products after its shutdown.

(Also see: Eight Extensions to Turbocharge Your Dropbox Experience)

While both the companies have declined to disclose the deal terms, a Dropbox spokesperson in a statement to Techcrunch said, "CloudOn's mission of making it easy to work on mobile aligns with Dropbox's goal of giving people the freedom to work the way they want, wherever they want."

Last year, the company had added a messaging startup Droptalk, photo app Loom and the collaborative document tool Hackpad to its list of acquisitions.

(Also see: Microsoft Partners With Dropbox for Online File-Sharing)