Box.net Rejects $550M Acquisition Offer, Writes its own Story in the Cloud
Sources say the cloud storage company Box(.net) has turned down a $550 million acquisition offer, according to reports. Rejecting a $550 million acquisition offer is not necessarily a wrong move for the in-demand company like Box, because it could indicate that the company is desirable and attract other for a richer offer.
Co-founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith moved the business they founded in their college dorm room from Seattle to the Valley in 2006. In January 2006, the film and business major dropped out of USC. Levie and high school buddy Dylan Smith moved into his uncle’s garage in Berkeley until a $350,000 check from Cuban made it possible for the two to relocate to Palo Alto.
The company has been high on the Business Journal’s list of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing companies for the past two years and is on the latest list too, which will be published next month, reporting almost $11 million in revenue.
“As you’ve gotten a sense in the past 7 or 8 months, the market is in nearly every variable and metric outperforming our expectations,” Levie, 26, told VentureBeat in an interview. “The market for cloud adoption, our ability to hire great people and our own expectation has been above what we even anticipated a couple of quarters ago.”
“The scale of the transition to the cloud from traditional enterprise software is causing this market to be larger than anyone expected, sooner than anyone expected,” he said. “We’re at the bleeding edge of that transition.”
Early this year Box raised $48 million in a funding round led by Emergence Capital and is in the process of adding $35 million to that round. They currently have 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February and Box is surely looking to grow in this arena, as the enterprise is a massive audience cloud services, including Dropbox (who also turned down an $800 acquisition deal from Apple), are looking to break into.
Meanwhile, Dropbox updated its mobile website last week, which can be found at dropbox.com/m. Dropbox states that it officially supports iPhone, Android (2.1+) and Windows Phone 7 devices. The browser built into pre-Anna Symbian devices will not support this new HTML5 website, but Symbian^3 users can still take advantage either by updating to Anna or using Opera Mobile 11.
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