I just saw the news on Techmeme that Box is raising another $35 million.

I’ll keep this brief. Wow. Combined with its past round that equates to $83 million in venture capital funding.

Venture Beat discovered the news in an SEC filing. Aaron Levie, one of the true characters of the Silicon Valley CEO world, had this to say:

“God bless the SEC and their rules on transparency, we’re haven’t quite completed anything on our end,” he said. “It’s effectively a two-part round.”

According to Levie, quoted in the Venture Beat article, the round includes existing investors like Andreessen-Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurveston.Its value is now estimated at $550 million.

The goal? Levie has never been shy about his ambitions with Box. He sees Microsoft in the company’s sights and needs as much firepower it can collect to continue making its attack.

Box is a storage service with a twist. It’s a collaborative tool with robust search behind it. That search is built on Lucene, the open-source search technology increasingly being used in the enterprise and Web-technology companies.

I wrote about the Box search capabilities on ReadWriteWeb back in 2009, right when Box was starting to ramp up:

Box.net uses a mix of open-source technologies to broaden the capabilities of its collaborative applications. As information is added to the network, the system adds the information from the documents into a relevance algorithm.

Users upload their documents into the Box.net environment, which gives the user the advantage of working across a finite universe as oppose to the great sea of the entire enterprise.This makes search a lot easier. Results can be served up to the user that may not have necessarily been requested. For instance, a marketing manager may do a search and get results that are not directly related to the query but are relevant, nonetheless.

And in this day and age of big data, great search can make the difference for an application, especially one that has such a deep mobile connection as Box does.

Services Angle

The strength behind Box is as much its mobile strategy as anything else. We’ve compared the service before to other online storage providers and last week we reported on its top ranking by Forrester for its mobile collaboration strengths and its new apps for Android and Blackberry. It has also made an investment in HTML 5 development. Its engineering team has doubled as of late and we expect with this round there will be another hiring round for the company.

Box has become a shining star of the Enterprise 2.0 movement. But now comes the real test to see if it really can be a company that continues to be exciting but also one that makes billions from its online service.