Online storage firm Box is the latest tech company to announce it’s heading for the stock market, this week revealing that it plans to raise $250 million through share sales when it hits the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the coming months.
The Los Altos, California startup filed for an IPO in January, though didn’t have to announce it publicly at the time. News of its intended course of action landed via a release from the firm on Monday in which it said it’d filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for the IPO.
The filing revealed that the nine-year-old company, which counts the likes of Dropbox, Google (Drive), and Microsoft (SkyDrive) among its competitors, generated $124.2 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2014, up from $58.8 million a year earlier. However, losses also increased in the same period, from $112.6 million to $168.6 million.
Box also revealed in the filing that it currently has somewhere in the region of 25 million registered users and about 34,000 paying business customers.
“Our paying business customers include more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies and 20 percent of Global 2000 companies, and our 25 million registered users include employees from 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including companies in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, energy and financial services,” Box said in its filing.
Speaking to TechRepublic last October about the idea of taking the company public, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie suggested hitting the stock market was going to happen sooner or later.
“IPO is sort of the natural path that companies take on, and we’re building a company that we think can be robust enough and successful enough that it makes sense as a public company,” Levie said.
The startup is expected launch on the NYSE next month, though the number and price of the shares is yet to be determined.
