BOX closed up 65.4% from its $14 IPO price, leaving it with a $2.77B market cap (15% above the valuation for its last funding round). 41.4M shares changed hands, or 3.3x the 12.5M sold through its IPO (before factoring the overallotment option).
Co-founder/CEO Aaron Levie, best known to some for his Twitter one-liners, made the rounds today, arguing more than once his company's offerings are well-differentiated from the aggressively-priced cloud storage/file-sharing services of tech giants.
Levie during a talk with Barron's: "What we’ve built really is software to help manage and collaborate and share throughout the business ... ultimately our customers buy our solution because we have built an amazing product to manage all that content. We get compared to more storage-oriented products, but there’s more to it."
He called Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), whose SharePoint collaboration platform is widely deployed and which is now offering unlimited OneDrive storage to Office 365 subs, Box's biggest competitor, but also one Box can stand out relative to. "I think our real differentiation is we do all the enterprise-oriented delivery, the industry compliance for FINRA, the security, and all that — but the really unique part is we deliver that in a consumer-grade experience, with open APIs, and that works across platforms."
Levie suggests to Forbes Box will focus going forward on giving clients more tools for using/interpreting data, pointing to its recent acquisition of medical image-sharing platform MedXT as an example. He also notes Box is investing in industry-specific machine learning tools that analyze content to organize, surface, and recommend documents.
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