Box bags $15M for cloud collaboration

Funding comes one week after Box launched an iPad app. Scale’s Rory O’Driscoll joins the board.

Cloud-based file-sharing service Box.net has raised a $15 million Series C round to expand its engineering, sales and marketing efforts, bringing its total venture funding to $29.5 million. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, and Scale’s Rory O’Driscoll has joined the Box board of directors. CEO Aaron Levie told me existing investors DFJ and US Venture Partners participated "heavily" in the round.

Box.net started out in 2005 as an ftp alternative. In February of 2008, it added collaboration and morphed into a Google Docs alternative. Since then, the company has added features and integrations at a swift clip, and has grown into a Microsoft SharePoint competitor.

Box is big on collaboration across the cloud. The service links up with editor tools like Zoho, EditGrid and Picnik, lets users publish directly to Blogger, LiveJournal and Wordpress, and integrates with other collaboration services like Google Apps, SAP StreamWork and Salesforce.com. It also has a handy iPhone app and was quick to launch a Box App for iPad last week.

On the business front, the company says it has more than 4 million users and business, and that deals with large enterprises including the Oprah Winfrey Network, Volvo and Nokia Siemens Networks have driven revenue in Q1 to 3 times what it was a year ago.

Levie wouldn’t comment on whether he though an acquisition might be on the horizon, saying the company is focused on growth and building the product. The addition of Scale’s Rory O’Driscoll bodes well for the company’s exit potential. Rory was Scale’s lead partner on investments in OuterBay Technologies, Picolight, Good Technology, and Omniture, all of which were acquired for healthy sums in the last five years.