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Box just keeps packing away piles of venture capital money.
The online storage and enterprise collaboration tool provider revealed July 31 that it has landed a jaw-dropping new $125 million investment, which includes $100 million from global growth investor General Atlantic. This amounts to a Series E funding round.
Last October, the Los Altos, Calif.-based company landed $81 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA. SAP Ventures and Salesforce also are participating as strategic investors. Previous investors Andreesen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated in that Series D expansion round.
The investments will fund continued support of Box’s growing enterprise customer base, global expansion, and product research and development, CEO Aaron Levie told eWEEK.
Box, which started out in 2005 as a consumer online storage company along with a spate of competitors, such as Dropbox, SugarSync, Mozy, Carbonite, i365 and others, made a pivot about two and half years ago to focus on the enterprise cloud backup and collaboration tool market instead.
“This new funding allows us to invest aggressively in the talent, technology and global expansion efforts required for Box to sit at the center of this (confluence of cloud, data and social networking) shift and define the next generation of enterprise software,” Levie said.
Also on July 31, Box added a new member to its board of directors: Gary Reiner, operating partner at GA and former CIO of General Electric.
Box’s business continued to grow briskly in the first half of 2012. Levie told eWEEK that the company’s enterprise sales jumped a full 200 percent year-over-year, with the average deal size nearly doubling during the same period.
Box now counts more than 7 million individual and 120,000 business customers–including individuals at 92 percent of the Fortune 500–that use its service to share and manage content in the cloud. Levie said about 250,000 new users are joining each month.
In Q2 2012, Box expanded its operations in Europe with the opening of a London office, as well as a third data center to support its growing customer base, which includes large enterprises like Procter & Gamble, DreamWorks, AAA, McAfee, Netflix and Random House.
In addition to GA, other participants in the latest round of investment include current Box investors Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, in addition to new investor Social + Capital Partnership.