Box.net raises $81 Million in an Extension Round

Box.net, the cloud storage provider, has recently announced the closure of a news $81 million extension to its fourth round of funding. This new extension has been sustained by the old investors along with some new investors from New Enterprise Associates and from Bessemer Venture Partners.

Box.net is a company which provides back-end storage on remote servers for enterprise applications. For them, this new funding expansion brings a new and consistent quantity of cash which is going to help them develop and become a land rush in the enterprise software space. Aaron Levie, the Chief Executive at Box.net, announced that the money raised in this expansion is going to be used for research, but also for development and for staffing and other “marketable” expansion plans. This means that the company is very dedicated to expanding at this moment, which demonstrates that it has a fast pace of growing.

The latest round of Box.net points out to the fact that the company is valuated more than $600 million, but it seems that the most recent filings indicate the fact that the company is only worth around $550. It has been earlier this year that Aaron Levie announced that he had turned down and buyout offer which has been offered to the company, in the amount of $500 million. This has been reported before the company’s first Boxworks conference which took place in San Francisco, Calif.

The company does not only plan to expand its research and development plan, but it also intends to start an “innovation network”, which is a third-party development community of sorts that use Box.net as a storage back-end for enterprise applications. At the moment, Aaron Levie declared that he hopes that all of the enterprises which specialize in developing applications, may them be large or small, are going to desire to take its specific applications and wrap it around the cloud storage provided by Box.net. For the moment, Levie did not want to disclose neither of the financial details which come along with this new funding deal, but they will eventually be made public later this year.

The company also intends to build a third data center, although Levie declared that the company does not experience any type of strain on its networks. It seems that the deals with Salesforce.com and with SAP have been strategic deals and that both these companies are going to work together to this software in one way or another. At the moment, Box.net has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the most successful companies in the world, according to the Fortune 500 list, have already used the services provided by the company by now. It seems that almost half of the amount of $162 million which the company has raised up to the moment continues to be in the bank. Despite this great amount of money which is now available in the company’s accounts, Levie has said that Box.net still considers raising some more funds, despite of the fact that the investors want the company to be made public.

Aaron Levie stated the following: “Obviously, if I’ve learned anything it’s not to say that this will be the last round. We’re always on the lookout for a good deal.”