Box (Box.net)

Box (Box.net) is a developer of web applications for corporate collaboration, the Cloud Content Management platform.

History

2011

The Box.net cloud hosting service announced in October 2011 that it raised $81 million in the fourth round of funding from a number of investors. Investors were Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with the participation of Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, reports TechCrunch. After this round, the total volume of investments attracted by the startup is already $162 million.

According to TechCrunch sources, in the last round, the total value of the company was estimated at more than $600 million.

Since its founding in 2005, Box has received more than $300 million from venture capital investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Andreessen Horowitz. Now it has over 150 thousand corporate clients and more than 15 million individual users.

Box customers include more than 90% of Fortune 500 people, and the company's turnover over the past year grew by almost 150% - due to the high demand for document collaboration tools provided by the service, which allow company employees to interact with each other and with external participants, for example, customers and partners.

The company has a number of competitors, including Egnyte, YouSendIt and Dropbox file storage and sharing services, as well as collaboration - Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive.

In May 2011, the company bought an application called Folders - a user interface for iPhone and iPad to Box, Google Drive and Dropbox services. Box said that they plan to merge Folders with their own client application of the service for iOS and that this year a new version will be released. Folders includes PDF viewing modules, documents in other formats and images, an audio and video player, audio and video recording tools, as well as a note creation and editing tool.^[1]

In the same month, Box bought Crocodoc, a developer of technology for converting documents in various formats into code on HTML5. It will be used instead of the current mechanism for previewing documents stored on the service.

According to a July 2013 study by Forrester Research, Box.net, IBM Connections, and EMC Syncplicity led the market for such services. The market leader, the Box service, received more than $300 million in investments from investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Andreessen Horowitz. The service has more than 150 thousand customers and 15 million end users, with 90% of Fortune 500 companies among its users.

The number of users of the Box.net service exceeds 7 million people, and the number of documents placed on its servers is more than 300 million.

2015

Box Inc. (NYSE: BOX), an online data storage company, soared more than 65% on its debut trading day (January 23, 2015) on the stock exchange. During the IPO, Box Inc. sold 12.5 million shares, which is about 10% of the issued, at a price of $14 apiece. Friday's close was $23.23.

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