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Box continues momentum with $81m funding round
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 by Angela Ashenden
Yesterday, Box.net announced the completion of a Series D funding round which raised an impressive $81 million from investors including Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth. This figure is added to the $48 million funding announced by Box earlier in the year, and highlights the buoyant position of the six-year old company in the online content and collaboration market.
As we discussed in our recent On The Radar report on Box, the company has been growing rapidly over the last two years, both in revenues and headcount – with the current headcount at “nearly 300″ (it was around 200 when I published the report in June, and 65 in early 2010) and apparently still growing. Its next challenge is building out a partner and developer ecosystem to help the company win the enterprise-wide deals which have been elusive so far (its customer base is made up largely of independent professionals and SMBs, with some departmental wins in large enterprises), and the Box Innovation Network (“/bin”) which was announced alongside the funding is no doubt part of this strategy, “providing funding, consulting and other resources to developers”.
Just as challenging though will be how well Box’s company culture can cope with the overwhelming influx of new employees; to date most are based at Box’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, but as the company necessarily becomes more distributed, it will become harder to retain the level of focus and agility that has got it to where it is today. So… a great test of Box’s own technology and best practices for internal collaboration, perhaps? We’ll be watching with interest..
Posted in Collaboration