Box Closes $81M Round, Biggest Round to Date

Box.net, a cloud storage provider, announced it’s closed a massive $81 billion round of funding. New investors Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates chipped in, alongside existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth.

“Even though the funding was announced in two stages–an $18.6 million D-1 round from insiders in August and now this one, a D-2–it came together in a couple of weeks, according to Box.net Chief Executive Aaron Levie, who called the tech industry’s transition to the cloud “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

Box raised a total of $162 million in funding to date. The six year-old company got a lot of VC attention this year, and raised the vast majority of this sum in the past 12 months.

The company’s previous funding round was in August, when it raised $35 million from Andreessen-Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurveston. Earlier in February Andreessen-Horowitz led a $48 million funding round for the cloud service provider.  Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners are the other investors that participated in that round, in addition to  Hercules TGC which provided $10 million in debt financing.

The company managed to attract a number of high profile Silicon Valley investors, as well as a potential buyer. Before this latest funding round, sources reported that Box rejected a $550 million buyout bid, a decision that in retrospective turned out to be a pretty good decision.

Box had a fair share of the financial headlines recently thanks to a strong offering that bundles up web-based storage with collaboration features for business users and search, which in turn helps to simplify navigation.  It recently unveiled an enterprise version of its offering called Box Sync.

This is the second SAP Ventures investment in the past week, as the firm put $10 million into One97.