Cloud player Box files for US$250m IPO

25 Mar 2014

Aaron Levie’s cloud storage company Box is planning to raise US$250m in an IPO. The company has posted full-year revenues of US$124m and has filed an S-1 with the U.S. Security and Exchanges Commission.

The IPO is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and a number of banks.

In its S-1 document, Box says it has 34,000 paying organisation, 25m registered users, and more than 2.5bn content interactions every three months.

“Our paying business customers include more than 40pc of Fortune 500 companies and 20pc of Global 2000 companies, and our 25m registered users include employees from 99pc of Fortune 500 companies, including companies in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, energy and financial services,” the company said.

“There are several fundamental technology trends that are dramatically changing both individual behaviour and enterprise IT infrastructure. Information workers increasingly expect to be able to access and work with their business content from any internet-enabled device, and they demand solutions that are as simple to use as their consumer internet applications, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. However, legacy on-premise IT architectures were not built for ease of use or mobility.

“As a result, IT departments are increasingly pressured to find easier-to-use solutions that address employees’ changing work styles, while also protecting confidential content, including documents, presentations, spreadsheets and multimedia.

“At our founding, we recognised that content is more accessible, useful and powerful when it is centrally stored, managed and shared.”

Box said it is building a rich ecosystem and its platform integrates with applications by partners including Salesforce.com, NetSuite and others.

Video interview with Box CEO Aaron Levie

Cloud storage image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com