Box (company)

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Box (company)
Headquarters Los Altos, California
Key people Aaron Levie (CEO)
Dylan Smith (CFO)
Industry Technology
Employees 750[1]
Website www.box.com
Alexa rank positive decrease 71,744 (February 2014)[2]
Launched 2005 in Mercer Island, Washington

Box Inc. (formerly Box.net) is an online file sharing and cloud content management service for businesses. The company adopted a freemium business model, and provides up to 50 GB of free storage for personal accounts.[3] A mobile version of the service is available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, WebOS, and Windows Phone devices.[4] The company is based in Los Altos, California. They offer 10 GB of free storage, but in order to receive the 50 GB of free storage, users must download & try the Apple iOS version of their app.

Products

The core of the service is based around sharing, collaborating, and working with files that are uploaded to Box. Box offers 3 account types: Enterprise, Business and Personal.[5] Depending on the type of account, Box has features such as unlimited storage, custom branding and administrative controls. There are 3rd party integrations with applications like Google apps, NetSuite and Salesforce.

Funding

Box received angel capital from Mark Cuban in 2005, then raised a Series A round of $1.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2006. In late 2007, it raised a Series B round of $6 million, and another $7.1 million in 2009 from U.S. Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, bringing total investment to $14.6 million.[6]

In October 2009, Box acquired Increo Solutions, the developer of collaborative online document and media viewing tools Backboard and Embedit.in. As a result of this acquisition, Box launched two new features in January 2010: an integrated content viewer and the ability to embed these files anywhere on the web.[7]

In 2011, the company closed a $48 million funding round led by Meritech Capital Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Emergence Capital Partners. The 48 million included 10 million in debt financing from Hercules Technology Growth Capital.[8] "There was no capital limit and we could've raised more," said Mr. Levie.[9] Later that year, Box closed an $81 million funding round with investors including SAP and salesforce.com.[10] Revenues in 2011 were viewed by Will Smale of BBC News as being "not too shabby", considering the company's foundation date of 2005.[11]

In mid-2012, Box raised $125 million from General Atlantic and some of the company's previous backers, valuing Box at between $1.2 to 1.5 billion.[12]

According to a public document filed in October 2013, the company will raise a new funding round of $100 million.[13]

OpenBox

In December 2007 the company announced OpenBox, which connects content from Box with other web-based applications and services. Included were online services EchoSign, Autodesk, Zoho, ThinkFree, Scribd, Picnik, Zazzle, Twitter and Myxer. Since then, OpenBox added NetSuite, Salesforce, Google Apps, FedEx, MindMeister, Fuze Meeting and others.

OpenBox allowed developers to create services that will interact with a user's files on Box.com. The application programming interface is implemented over conventional XML.[14]

Box announced a program in September 2009 for developers to make mobile content accessible to other apps and services.

Reception

Aaron Levie speaks at "The Cloud Rises: The Latest From a Ten-Year-Old Trend" (Aspen Institute Campus)

In 2009, the Company was awarded the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal's Emerging Tech award for the cloud computing category,[15] and was a WebWare 100 Award winner in 2007 and 2008, and one of AlwaysOn's "AO Top Private Companies" for 2007.[16] Cofounders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith were among the top five finalists in Business Week's "Best Entrepreneurs 25 and Under" rankings for 2009.[17] In 2009, Box was nominated "Best Enterprise Start-up" Crunchie In 2010,[18] and was listed as one of the "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.[19]

The company's CEO, Aaron Levie, published blog articles on TechCrunch.[20][21] He spoke at industry events.[22] The company's CFO, Dylan Smith, was on an episode of the reality TV show Millionaire Matchmaker in 2010.[23]

Sharing

Box is a file-sharing network, which saves and stores the information uploaded by the customer to their web site. The company reserves the full legal right to demographic information about their customers, sales, and traffic to their partners and advertisers. Even though the company does not have the right to give, sell, rent, share or trade any personal information uploaded to their web site by their customers unless consent is given by the user of an account, a third party may be able to view some information (for which some terms and policies have been set forth, in order to protect the site and customers towards the ends of establishing a full-functioning, informative, and well organized file-sharing network).[24]

With the user's consent private details (such as name, email address, photo, and profile information) can be shared with other users.[24] People a user invites as editors can also edit an account's shared files, upload documents and photos to a shared files folder (and thus share those documents outside of Box), and give other users rights to view shared files.[24]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Data Storage Player Prepares to Compete Overseas
  2. ↑ "Box.net Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-02-01. 
  3. ↑ Fisher, Sharon (2010-11-03). "Box.net Expands Capacity And Services – Network Computing". Networkcomputing.com. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  4. ↑ "Box Mobile Access". Box.com. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  5. ↑ "Select a Plan". Box. Retrieved 2013-06-14. 
  6. ↑ Box.net#cite note-0
  7. ↑ Box.net#cite note-3
  8. ↑ By Douglas MacMillan - 2011-02-24T16:22:08Z (2011-02-24). "Box.net Receives $48 Million Investment, Led by Meritech – Bloomberg". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  9. ↑ Pui-Wing Tam, & Amir Efrati. (2011, March 10). Web Start-Ups Get Upper Hand Over Investors --- VC Firms Drive Up Valuations, Attach Fewer Strings to Deals. Wall Street Journal (Eastern Edition), p. B.1. Retrieved March 24, 2011, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 2287815741).
  10. ↑ "SAP, Salesforce Invest in Box Cloud Collaboration Service". Enterprise Apps Today. 2011-10-17. Retrieved 2013-06-14. 
  11. ↑ Smale, Will (May 20, 2013). "Aaron Levie: Not your typical multimillionaire". BBC News. Retrieved 2013-05-20. 
  12. ↑ "CORRECTED-General Atlantic invests $100 mln in Box". Reuters. Retrieved 2013-06-14. 
  13. ↑ Eric Blattberg, VentureBeat. “Box strikes back at Dropbox with $100M round and a $2B valuation.” Nov 20, 2013. Retrieved Nov 21, 2013.
  14. ↑ "Box Platform Developer Documentation / Welcome to the Box Platform". Developers.box.net. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  15. ↑ "Box.net lets you store, share, work in the computing cloud". December 6, 2009. 
  16. ↑ "The 2007 AlwaysOn Top 100 Private Companies". Scribd.com. 2009-06-16. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  17. ↑ "The Winning Young Entrepreneurs, 2009 – BusinessWeek". Businessweek.com. 2009-11-09. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  18. ↑ Needleman, Rafe. "Live Mesh posts – Webware – CNET". News.cnet.com. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  19. ↑ "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies". Lead411.com. 2010-05-25. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  20. ↑ Aaron Levie (2010-11-07). "Building the Simple Enterprise". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  21. ↑ Guest Author (2010-07-25). "Enterprise Software Is Sexy Again". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  22. ↑ "Freemium for Sale: 6 Reasons You'd be Crazy Not to Give Your Software Out for Free: Web 2.0 Expo New York 2010 – Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, September 27 –". Web2expo.com. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  23. ↑ "The Millionaire Matchmaker Season 3 – Episode 11 – Hillel and Dylan – Bravo TV Official Site". Bravotv.com. Retrieved 2013-06-27. 
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 "Privacy Policy". Box. 2012-06-13. Retrieved 2013-06-14. 

External links

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