Box.net Closes $81 Million Investment

Box, Inc. has raised $81 million in additional capital to help enterprises worldwide move information and collaboration to the cloud, and build an ecosystem of next-generation enterprise applications.

Strategic investors salesforce.com and SAP Ventures participated in the Series D Expansion round, along with Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, and prior investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth.

The new investment brings Box’s total capital raised to $162 million.

Box is one of the fastest-growing enterprise applications of all time, with 7 million individuals and 100,000 businesses using its service to share and manage content in the cloud, and 250,000 new users joining each month. The company has experienced traction in the enterprise, with adoption in 77 percent of the Fortune 500, and large deployments with companies including AAA, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, and McAfee, as well as an 18,000-seat deal with Procter & Gamble. Box has also scaled its team from 125 to nearly 300 employees in 2011 to date, including key senior hires from companies such as Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetSuite, and Oracle.

"Businesses of all sizes are moving their information and collaboration to the cloud, and with this new capital we’ll support their transition by continuing to aggressively out-innovate legacy players like Microsoft," said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. "We’re redefining how enterprises share and manage content on Box, while also building a powerful, open ecosystem of partners and developers to help our customers get more value and flexibility from their information than ever before possible."

In November, Box plans to launch /bin (the Box Innovation Network), an initiative designed to support and grow an ecosystem of next-generation enterprise applications that bring new value to enterprise information. The program will drive innovation in what has been a historically slow moving market by providing funding, consulting and other resources to developers that are passionate about transforming the way people work. Today, Box integrates with 120 applications, including cloud solutions from Salesforce, SAP StreamWork, Google Apps and NetSuite. Box will also use the new capital to expand its international presence, and to further build out its infrastructure in the U.S., opening a third data center in 2012.

"Box is poised to redefine the content management and collaboration industry by challenging the enterprise status quo and building a powerful, open ecosystem of partners," said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "The market potential for Box is massive. The company has already inspired one hundred thousand businesses to rethink the way they share and manage content, and they are just getting started."

"The consumerization of the enterprise is driving entirely new technology usage and buying patterns, and Box has established itself as a leader in the wave of solutions emerging to support the new way that people work," said Kittu Kolluri, general partner at NEA. "Box has built a compelling solution that marries ease of use with enterprise-class security and management that delights users and IT leaders alike."

"Box is helping organizations make better decisions faster by bringing new innovation to business information," said Jai Das, managing director, SAP Ventures. "As an investor and partner, we’re excited about how Box is reinventing content management and collaboration, and look forward to working with them to make customers more productive."