

In July 2016, ownCloud GmbH, based in Nuremberg Germany, secured additional financing, and expanded its management team. developers left ownCloud to form the fork with Karlitschek.

and founded a new company and project called Nextcloud in June 2016, resulting in the closure of ownCloud's U.S. In April 2016, Karlitschek left ownCloud Inc. OwnCloud Inc., the company founded by Markus Rex, Holger Dyroff and Frank Karlitschek, has attracted funding from investors, including an injection of 6.3 million US$ in 2014. The company was founded in 2011 and forked the code away from KDE to GitHub. The development of ownCloud was announced in January 2010, in order to provide a free software replacement to proprietary storage service providers. Its openness avoids enforced quotas on storage space or the number of connected clients, instead of having hard limits (for example on storage space or number of users) limits are determined by the physical capabilities of the server. OwnCloud supports extensions that allow it to work like Google Drive, with online office suite document editing, calendar and contact synchronization, and more. (The company's ownCloud.online is a hosted service.) The Server Edition of ownCloud is free and open-source, thereby allowing anyone to install and operate it without charge on their own private server. The primary functional difference between ownCloud and Dropbox is that ownCloud is primarily server software.

ownCloud functionally has similarities to the widely used Dropbox. OwnCloud is a suite of client–server software for creating and using file hosting services. Clients: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS
