SAP, Salesforce Invest in Box Cloud Collaboration Service
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) are among the investors in an $81 million funding round for cloud collaboration provider Box.
Box bills itself as “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. The company claims that 250,000 new users join each month.
Salesforce.com and SAP are among the new investors participating in the series D expansion round, along with Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, and prior investors Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth. The new investment brings Box's total capital raised to $162 million.
In the enterprise, Box has gained solid traction, with adoption in 77 percent of the Fortune 500 and large deployments with companies such as AAA, Amylin Pharmaceuticals and McAfee, as well as an 18,000-seat deal with Procter & Gamble. Box has also rapidly scaled its team from 125 to nearly 300 employees this year, 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.”
Using the Box service lets organizations store documents, media and all types of content online so it can be shared and managed from anywhere with a link or as a shared folder with anyone inside or outside the company. Users set access permissions and 256-bit SSL encryption.
Box currently integrates with 120 applications, including leading cloud solutions such as Salesforce, SAP StreamWork, Google Apps and NetSuite. Content on Box can be shared internally and externally, accessed through iPad, iPhone, Android and PlayBook applications, and extended to partner applications.
The new investment will further help Box to launch /bin (the Box Innovation Network) in November. This initiative is designed to support and grows an ecosystem of next-generation enterprise applications that bring new value to enterprise information, Box says. 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,” the company said.
Box also said it 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.
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