Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Box Just Raised $48M in Funding: Here’s Why

By , Social Media Manager

The world of enterprise information technology is changing dramatically. Prohibitive pricing models, inflexible infrastructure, and lack of end-user satisfaction are all unsustainable in today’s business environment. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social tools have reinvented how we think about technology and ignited a revolution in the enterprise. This is a revolution that is democratizing enterprise software – the cloud has dramatically leveled the playing field for the delivery of services, and for the first time, technology adoption in the enterprise is being driven by the bottom-up.

We are in the middle of one the greatest shifts ever seen in computing and information technology. For too long, the best technology solutions were only available to the largest of enterprises, and were only barely meeting the needs of IT, let alone end users. Box’s opportunity is to bring remarkably powerful tools to every business in the world. Throughout the globe, we’re enabling our 60,000 customers – companies large and small – to be more productive, more connected, and more collaborative than ever before. With Box, enterprises like Dell and Panasonic bring new products to market faster; Turner and McCarthy construct buildings and infrastructure with more ease; and MTV and Six Flags are able to collaborate on information more efficiently and with less cost.

To capitalize on the size and scale of the possibilities that lie ahead, we’re announcing today that Box has raised nearly $50M in additional capital to help us continue our momentum and deliver our solution to every business in the world. We’re incredibly excited that Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech, and Emergence have chosen to work with us. This latest group of investors is responsible for bringing the world wide web to mass market (Netscape), helping enterprises run better data center operations (Opsware), and collectively funding companies like Facebook, Salesforce, Netsuite, and SuccessFactors. We’re extremely excited to bring them on board, as well as continue to work with our incredibly supportive existing investors DFJ, USVP, and ScaleVP.

What this news means for customers:

Box will be using this capital to invest in building the best possible product and customer experience possible. We compete with, and work with, some of the largest companies in the world, and to be as effective as we can, we simply have to have the best technology. Here are just some of the ways this investment will enhance the platform and application we’re building:

1. Continued investment in strengthening our infrastructure – faster, more reliable, and the most secure service possible.

2. Bigger initiatives around mobility – support for all the major mobile platforms that you’re using in your business, beyond iPhone/iPad and Android.

3. Making Box work for businesses of all sizes – building out better ways for your business, regardless of size, to deploy and implement Box.

4. Connected to more of the solutions you use – releasing more synchronization services, connecting with enterprise technology you’re already using, and more.

5. Creating the best possible enterprise collaboration experience – better, easier ways to share information with people inside and outside your business, securely.


There will be many other areas in which we invest, but our goal at Box is to create the absolute best way to share and manage your information in the cloud. We’ll continue to invest disproportionately to create the simplest, most scalable, flexible, and secure experience possible for our customers.

What this means for Box employees:

Box’s beginnings were modest – we were financed initially by Dylan’s poker winnings and worked out of my uncle’s garage – but the growth we’ve experienced in the past couple of years has truly underscored the potential of our platform and the amazing opportunity ahead. We must invest aggressively to continue this success. We are no longer a small startup, but a 140-person strong organization that must do everything in its power to bring better technology to the enterprise.

To realize the full potential of our service, and deliver this new experience to customers, we must build a different kind of enterprise software company. The ways in which we sell, support, and serve our customers will look different from most companies that have come before us. Thanks to our freemium business model, our business and economics are fundamentally more aligned with our customers’ success; enterprises will only pay us if our technology is amazing, and working to solve their biggest challenges. This means we must continue to deliver a platform that’s the simplest to use, fastest to deploy, most connected, and most open of all the technology available.

This capital will be used to invest in our infrastructure, our product, and building out a world-class organization. We can only succeed in this competitive market through our ability to out-innovate, out-sell, and out-deliver incumbent or startup solutions. To do this, we will continue to hire the best individuals we can find – people that are extremely excited about changing how people do business.

Today’s enterprises need solutions built for people. 2011 will be the year that this enterprise software revolution moves past the early adopters and into the mainstream, bringing software that is simple, cloud-delivered, and mobile to all businesses, making this the most exciting and disruptive period in the history of enterprise IT. We’re very excited to be on the forefront of this change, and intend to bring about a new world of technology for all businesses.

We couldn’t have done this without the support of all our amazing customers. A big thank you to everyone who has supported us along the way.

Ok, now let’s all get back to work ☺

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO

By ,

Social Media Manager

See all of Mark's articles.

Showing 7 comments

WayneEvan February 24th, 2011

stand by box.net~ i really love the useful and clear net box ~_~

Thewebcitizen February 25th, 2011

Hey Aaron

Congrats on your new funding. I have been watching your company since mid 2006. You have a great product out there. Wish you all the best. I wanted to know however, how is your app store model going? Do people use it?

Thanks
Elias

Fank DiGiovanni February 25th, 2011

I have an accounting/distribution system which runs on the IBM i-series. I am looking for partners/venture capital to take the system nation wide. If you are interested, Please respond.

Jesus A. Virlar February 27th, 2011

Great job!…Lots of opportunities lie ahead! Especially in the healthcare industry!

Marc March 2nd, 2011

Congratulations
with all that money, you will be able to translate Box.net into other languages.

Marc.

Fisayo Sanyaolu @ Secrets Of Entrepreneurship March 17th, 2011

Congrats guys. I wish you success

Carl Hutzler March 22nd, 2011

Congrats on the funding! You seem to have a great set of services and keep expanding with integration with Gdocs and single sign on and more.

Too bad your Sales experience is absolutely TERRIBLE! I was interested in upgrading to Enterprise to take advantage of some features (Groups, and others) but my salesman was argumentative, evasive, and totally un-cool. What a terrible experience. I canceled my 14 day trial business level account an hour after I created it as my Sales experience was so disappointing.

The sales process should be easy to understand. Pricing should be up front and easy to understand. Features should be straight forward. Instead I got a ton of vague questions about how many “logins” my users would have. I was offered “special” discounts and “incentives” as long as my users did not cause any “abuse of the box.net backend systems” whatever that means. How do I measure abuse as the administrator or does Box.net just call me up out of the blue and say my users are using the system too much? I need to know what my pricing is going to be, period.

If you want IT Professionals like myself to use and recommend your system to clients, you have got to fix this sales process and get your product and pricing on the web and up front. Stop being evasive.

VERY disappointed potential customer.
-Carl