Dropbox Inc. on Monday offered a price range for shares in its initial public offering that would value the company at up to $7.1 billion — nearly a third below the valuation it commanded in 2014, and a sign of how overheated the private tech market became a few years ago. The cloud storage company is the largest tech IPO after a protracted dry spell, and investors are watching it for signs of how other highly valued tech companies will fare in public markets. San Francisco-based Dropbox set a price range of $16 to $18 per share, which would raise up to $648 million in the offering planned for Friday; the final price will be set on the eve of the IPO based on investor feedback. The pricing implies about a 30 percent drop from the $10 billion valuation Dropbox earned in early 2014 after a financing round led by BlackRock Inc. The company, which began as a free service to share and store photos, music and other large files, has raised more than $600 million from private investors. The spring calendar for technology offerings is relatively busy, including cybersecurity company Zscaler's planned debut later this week and music company Spotify's expected listing early next month. New investors ranging from mutual funds to hedge funds began piling into startups a few years ago in hopes of earning better returns than the public markets offered, driving a spike in investments beginning in 2014 and resulting in outsized valuations. Now, Dropbox's valuation cut suggests other companies that raised large sums at high valuations but remain unprofitable, such as Uber Technologies Inc., may face valuation decreases when they, too, go public. "Dropbox is still loss-making and its revenue is not enough to justify a market value of $10 billion," said Phil Davis, chief executive of Phil's Stock World, an investment advisory service. "The price had to come down to lure in the investors." While venture financing remains high, startup valuations have mostly stabilized in the United States. Dropbox competes with much larger companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Microsoft Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., as well as its main rival Box Inc. It long struggled to monetize a product that many of its larger rivals offer for free and moved to offer more products for businesses, such as file sync and group collaboration tools. The efforts appear to have paid off: revenues grew 31 percent to $1.1 billion in 2017 over the prior year, and losses narrowed by almost half to $112 million. Last year, it had positive free cash flow of $305 million, more than double the previous year. By comparison, revenue at Box, which launched two years before Dropbox, is expected to increase 25 percent to about $506 million this fiscal year from a year earlier. Box, which is also not profitable, went public in 2015. Dropbox's $7.07 billion valuation—based on the high end of its IPO price range—is 2.5 times Box's $2.85 billion market capitalization. Despite its progress and four years of growth, some investors say Dropbox's financial performance still does not justify its 2014 valuation. Eric Schiffer, chairman and chief executive of the Patriarch Organization, a private equity firm, said Wall Street was assigning more rational valuations to what he called "grossly overvalued unicorns," using the term for startup companies valued at $1 billion or more. "The IPO is a slap in the face to investors of the 2014 round," he added. Dropbox, co‑founded in 2007 by Andrew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, has 500 million users across 180 countries, though most use the free service; about 11 million are paying customers. Upon completion of the public offering, Dropbox will sell $100 million worth of common stock at the IPO price to the venture-capital arm of Salesforce.com Inc. in a separate private placement, the company said. Houston is the largest shareholder and will retain 24 percent of Dropbox after selling 2.3 million shares in the offering. Sequoia Capital is the largest outside investor, with about a 25 percent stake. Reporting by Heather Somerville in San Francisco and Diptendu Lahiri in Bengaluru. Additional reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru. Editing by Peter Henderson and Leslie Adler.