Dropbox hopes to upload 500 million files to its account. Little green files, with pictures of presidents on them.

The cloud-based file-storing and -sharing company submitted paperwork Friday to raise up to $500 million in an initial public offering.

Apple's Steve Jobs once famously wrote off the Dropbox service as a "feature, not a product," but that didn't stop the company from becoming one the first and largest Silicon Valley unicorns, or businesses valued at more than $1 billion.

Dropbox lets you easily upload computer files to a storage drive in the cloud. From there, you can access them on other computers or share them with friends and co-workers. There's a free version, as well as a "premium" subscription offering.

In its IPO filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Dropbox said it has 11 million paying subscribers out of 500 million total registered users in 180 countries. Its average revenue per paying user is $111.91. The service brought in $1.1 billion in revenue last year, the company said. That's up from $845 million in 2016 and $604 million in 2015.

Dropbox isn't profitable yet, though: It lost almost $112 million in 2017. That's less than the $210 million loss the year before and 2015's deficit of $326 million.

And it's not the only player in the market. In its filing, the company name-checks Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft as rivals in the cloud storage space. It further names Atlassian, Google and Microsoft as competitors when it comes to content collaboration. It also says it competes with Box in cloud storage used by large enterprises.

Other tidbits from the filing: Founder Drew Houston owns 25.3 percent of the company; the board includes former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former HP CEO and onetime California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman; and the company will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol DBX.

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