Dropbox Acquires Zulip, a Workplace Chat Solution Built by MIT Alumni

Dropbox acquired Zulip, a workplace chat solution built by a team of MIT alumni including Tim Abbott, Jeff Arnold, Waseem Daher, and Jessica McKellar — several of whom are TJHSST alumni. At the time, Zulip was still in private beta but had developed applications for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Android. The platform's distinguishing feature was its topic-based threading model.

In September 2015, Dropbox released Zulip under an open-source Apache license. Tim Abbott subsequently led the revival of the project as an independent open-source effort, and Zulip continues to be one of the leading open-source team chat platforms today. Several co-founders went on to found Pilot, the bookkeeping startup that reached unicorn status.