Box, Inc.

Who owns Box, Inc.?
Box, Inc. is owned by public shareholders and trades on the NYSE under ticker BOX. Institutional investors hold the majority of shares. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is the largest individual shareholder, and the company has no parent company or controlling family.

Is Box, Inc. publicly traded?
Yes. Box trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker BOX. It went public on January 23, 2015, at $14 per share after a delayed IPO process that began with a March 2014 filing.

When was Box founded?
Box was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, who started the company while still in college, building the product from Smith's parents' house on Mercer Island, Washington.

What does Box, Inc. do?
Box provides a cloud platform for enterprise content management: storing, sharing, securing, governing, and automating unstructured content such as documents, contracts, and media files. Its platform includes e-signatures, workflow automation, compliance tools, and AI capabilities under the Intelligent Content Management name.

How much revenue does Box make?
Box reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $1.177 billion, up 8 percent year over year, for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026. Record billings reached $1.223 billion and non-GAAP operating margin was 28.3 percent.

Where is Box headquartered?
Box, Inc. is headquartered in Redwood City, California, with additional offices in Chicago, New York, London, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw, and Amsterdam.

Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith founded Box in 2005 as college students, coding the first version from Smith's parents' house on Mercer Island, Washington. Levie, then at the University of Southern California, handled business and marketing while Smith, at Duke University, wrote the code. Early funding included a $15,000 investment from Mark Cuban, famously financed in part by poker winnings, followed by seed capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The company's defining early decision came in 2007 and 2008: abandon the consumer market and build for enterprises. At the time, Dropbox and Google were racing to give away storage. Box instead invested in access controls, audit logs, administrative consoles, and compliance certifications, betting that IT departments would pay for governance even as storage commoditized. The bet worked. By 2010, Box had moved headquarters to Redwood City, California, raised large venture rounds, and signed its first Fortune 500 customers.

Box filed to go public in March 2014, but the offering stalled. Skepticism about the company's losses, sales spending, and competition forced a delay of roughly ten months, an episode widely covered in technology and financial press. Box finally priced its IPO on January 23, 2015, at $14 per share on the New York Stock Exchange.

Through the late 2010s, Box broadened the platform beyond storage. It added Box Platform APIs for developers, Box Skills for machine learning integrations, Box KeySafe for customer-managed encryption, and Box Zones for regional data residency. In 2021 it launched Box Sign, bringing native e-signature capability into the platform after acquiring e-signature startup SignRequest in 2020.

Activist investor Starboard Value disclosed a stake in 2019 and campaigned for margin improvement and board changes. A 2021 settlement gave Starboard board representation, and the following years produced a sustained profitability shift: non-GAAP operating margin rose from the low teens to 28.3 percent by fiscal 2026.

From 2023 onward, Box reoriented the product around AI. Box AI launched to let customers query and summarize stored documents using large language models, and the Enterprise Advanced suite, released in fiscal 2026, bundles advanced AI and intelligent workflow automation. Enterprise Advanced customers already represented 10 percent of revenue within the suite's first year, at price uplifts of 30 to 40 percent over Enterprise Plus.

Box's most public corporate drama was its delayed IPO. The March 2014 filing and subsequent ten-month postponement drew heavy coverage of its losses and sales intensity, becoming a standard example in discussions of SaaS market timing.

Starboard Value's 2019 activist campaign put governance under scrutiny. The investor publicly criticized spending and growth, and the dispute ended with a 2021 settlement adding independent directors. The episode is now largely viewed as a catalyst for the company's improved margins.

On the regulatory front, Box maintains a clean record relative to peers. It holds FedRAMP authorization for US federal use and publishes standard security disclosures in its SEC filings. No major mass breach of customer content has been reported.