After filing for an IPO in March, Box has raised $150M from TPG Growth and Coatue Management. The $150M in funding is intended to delay Box’s IPO given a weak market for technology IPOs and tech stocks more generally. As a result of the recent round of funding, Box has an estimated valuation of $2.4 billion and TPG Growth is expected to earn a seat on Box’s board of directors. Box’s first quarter revenue jumped 94% to $45.3M from $23.4M in 2013. Despite its impressive Q1 2014 increase in revenue, Box remains unprofitable and reported a loss of $38.5M for the first quarter of 2014 in comparison to $34M for the corresponding period in 2013. Box CEO Aaron Levie remarked on this week’s funding raise as follows:
Our mission is to help organizations be more productive, collaborative and competitive by connecting people and their most important information. This focus has been instrumental in building a customer base that includes some of the most influential businesses in the world. We’re excited to work with TPG Growth and Coatue as we continue to aggressively invest in our customers, technology, and future growth.
Here, Levie underscores the way in which cloud-based technologies such as the Box platform facilitate collaboration and productivity in much the same vein that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touts the value of cloud computing as enabling collaboration and communication. Box boasts users spanning over 240,000 businesses worldwide and was recently named a leader in Gartner’s inaugural Magical Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing amongst Citrix, EMC and Accellion. Nevertheless, post-IPO filing capital raises are rare and underscore the cooling market for cloud-based technologies as U.S. investors critically engage whether lucrative tech IPOs will be able to sustain their valuations, post-IPO, year after year. Box does intend to go public in 2014, but not until after Labor Day.
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