Data Backup Digest

Box, a cloud storage provider, announced in the latter half of March that they filed an S-1 registration form with the SEC, leading up to the company’s initial public offering.

It’s not known for sure when the offering will be made public, but the firm will attempt to raise $250 million. The amount of shares that will be sold, along with their price range, have still not been determined, according to a statement the company issued.

Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan will be in charge of the deal, with BMO Capital Markets taking on the role of lead manager. It is expected that the company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol BOX.

Box is continuing to make growth within the enterprise market. According to the filing with the SEC, more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies and 20 percent of Global 2000 companies use Box.

On top of this, the service has over 25 million registered users. It is estimated that workers from 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies use the service.

Over 225,000 companies (like Gap, Amerprise Financial and Schneider Electric) use Box and of these 34,000 are paying users. Box’s data centres apparently handle over 2.5 billion content interactions every three moments and their largest deployment contained over 60,000 users.

Box have said that their users come from “highly regulated industries such as healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, energy and financial services” in order to show the legitimacy of their service. Recently the company have been focussing on IT environments in big businesses.

The cloud storage provider has paired up with Salesforce and Netsuite, allowing their uses to make full use of Box without leaving their preferred environment. Also, tens of thousands of third-party developers make use of the Box platform on their applications.

Additionally, Box has joined the AppConnect program, enabling users to manage Box from MobileIron’s mobile device management platform.

Box have grown year on year since they first hit the scene back in 2005. For the twelve month periods ending in 31st December 2011, 31st January 2013 and 2014, their revenue was $21.1 million, $58.5 million and $124.2 million respectively. This represents year-over-year growth of 179 percent and 111 percent.

However, despite the large revenue figures thanks to strong sales, the company has occurred yearly net losses due to the investments it makes. The company have incurred net losses of $50.3 million, $112.6 million and $168.6 million over the same period.

It’s undoubtable that running a cloud storage service is a costly procedure and it’s the reason that Box is making a push to secure enterprise users. Home users, particularly those used to using competitors such as Dropbox for free, are not the main target audience. Box is, quite sensibly, aiming at where the money is.

The IPO shows that Aaron Levie, Box’s co-founder and CEO, holds only a 5.7 percent stake in the company. It’s a share that’s worth over $100 million, so certainly not small fry, but seems little when compared to the 25.5 percent stake held by venture capitalist investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson.