Dropbox, Inc. has acquired enterprise communications startup Clementine, Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 2013 and launched in August 2014, Clementine offers messaging, conference calls, and voice calls within an enterprise environment, with an aim to helping companies make the most of mobile voice and text at work.

“We’re now excited to announce the next stage of our journey — we’re joining Dropbox!” a post on the Clementine blog reads. “Our mission and passion for workplace collaboration remains the same. Our stage will grow dramatically as Dropbox builds on our technology to engage with its over 400 million users and 100,000 businesses.”

The services provided by the company however are not making the transition, with an announcement that it will shutter August 31st, and that customers will have to find alternative enterprise messaging services.

No reasons given

Dropbox hasn’t officially confirmed the acquisition at this stage, so why exactly they’ve acquired Clementine and shut it down isn’t clear.

Dropbox has made a number of acquisitions over the last 12 months to build upon its services as part of a push to gain more enterprise storage customers, but an enterprise level messaging service doesn’t naturally make a lot of sense; was it simply a talent buy, or is Dropbox planning to add enterprise messaging to its service somewhere down the line?

If it is adding enterprise messaging, it would be a strange add-on for a company that offers cloud storage services; perhaps, given it has been reported that they are struggling in the enterprise space given they were late to the game versus competitors such as Box, Inc. and others, that they’re looking to reinvent themselves as a multi-service enterprise provider?

Even if we presume it’s part of a reinvention strategy, the field in terms of enterprise messaging is already a hyper-competitive one, so although it may have a decent consumer level install base, it’s difficult to picture Dropbox gaining traction in that market in the same way they’ve struggled to gain traction in the enterprise cloud storage market.

Who knows? until Dropbox says something officially as to what it’s thinking in terms of this acquisition it’s all pure speculation and guess wok at this stage.

We can’t find any records of Clementine ever having taken funding, so there’s a good chance the company may have been bootstrapped prior to acquisition.