Nearly 10 months after Box filed for an initial public offering, the company appears to finally be ready to make its public debut.
Box on Friday said it plans to sell at least 12.5 million shares and offered a price range of $11 to $13. At the top end of that range, Box would raise $162.5 million in the IPO, and would be valued at $1.55 billion. In July, the company was given a $2.4 billion valuation after it raised money from TPG and Coatue Management in July.
The Palo Alto-based company, which sells software to businesses to store, transfer and manage data in the cloud, will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BOX. It will begin trading the week of Jan. 19, according to Renaissance Capital, kicking off the first quarter following what was the busiest year for IPOs in more than a decade. Re/code reports Jan. 22 for Box s debut.
Box could have listed shares by mid-April after filing for an IPO on March 24, per financial regulations. Tech companies on average take between filing and trading on a public market, according to research financial firm Ipreo. Box is pushing one year.
CEO Aaron Levie tweeted on Friday morning: Well that certainly took a while.
There are other reasons Box has to hurry up and join Wall Street. Under the terms Box agreed to as part of the TPG and Coatue $150 million investment in July, the company must go public by July 2015 at a value of no less than $20 per share or it will be on the hook to pay penalties to investors.
The company pushed out its public debut when tech stocks tanked in April, and then continued to delay amid skepticism over the company s financial health and whether it could compete with Google and other tech giants that offered cloud storage for a fraction of the price.
Last summer, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants launched a full-on price war for cloud software, offering much of the same services Box does at a much lower cost, and in some cases for free. Box has raised more than $350 million from investors; however, venture investments in cloud storage companies dropped from 2013 to 2014.
There are signs that Box has reined in some of the spending that had previously raised eyebrows. According to financial filings, Box spent 97 cents on sales and marketing for each dollar of revenue it made in the three months ending Oct. 31, down from $1.38 for every dollar of revenue in March of last year. Its losses narrowed to $121.5 million for the three months ending Oct. 31 from $125.2 million for the same period a year earlier.
Photo: Los Altos-based cloud storage company Box closed a $100 million funding round in December. Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group file photo.
