Box puts its long-delayed IPO back on schedule

The company sets price between $11 and $13, looks to raise up to $187 million

After filing to go public last year, cloud storage company Box eventually put those plans on hold, reportedly due to market conditions, and to get itself ready to make the plunge.

Now, though, it looks like the Box IPO is finally back on track.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the cloud storage company revealed that it will be registering around 14.4 million shares, at a price between $11 and $13 a share. That means it could raise as much as $186.9 million. 

That is short of the initial $250 million goal the company set itself, so perhaps the delay did have some negative impact on the company.

Box will list as "Box" (naturally) on the New York Stock Exchange. 

The filing also shed some light on the company's recent financial situation. In the nine months ending in October 2014, the company made $153.8 million in revenue, an 80% increase from the $85.4 million it made in the same period in 2013. 

At the same time, the company saw its net losses rise as well. The company lost $129 million in that nine-month period, up from $125 million the year before. 

Those losses are primarily being driven by Box's sales and marketing expenses, which added up to over $152 million, up from $124 million in 2013. That is nearly three times as much as it spent on its next highest expense: research and development, which only cost the company $48 million in the same time period.

The company initially filed to go public confidentially in 2014, taking advantage of a provision in the Jumpstart Our Business Startup (JOBS) Act. Those plans were scuttled, however, due to a downturn in the market for public cloud software companies, including Workday, Veeva Systems and Xero, all of which saw their stocks dip.

Since then, Box has added more to its coffers, raising a $150 million round of funding in July, to give it a $2.4 billion valuation, and added more acquisitions as well, including MedXT, a cloud-based medical image viewing, sharing and collaboration company, and Streem, a company that allows customers to stream files from the cloud to their desktop computers.

Founded in 2005, Box now has over 34,000 paying organizations, and over 25 million registered users. It is seeing over 2.5 billion content interactions every three months. While it started as a consumer-focused service, it pivoted to zero in on the enterprise. Clearly, it was a wise move.

Aaron Levie, Box's dynamic and indefatigable co-founder and CEO, gave a Vator Splash talk in 2012, sharing his lessons and advice on how and why he made that decision. Join other leading CEOs and founders at Vator Splash Health on February 12 (get tickets here) and Splash Oakland this April 23rd. (get tickets here)

(Image source: allthingsd.com)