Box seeks valuation of $1.6 billion in U.S. IPO

NEW YORK: Box Inc., the cloud-storage provider that first filed for an initial public offering last March, is proceeding with the share sale after several delays.

Box set the terms for its IPO today, indicating a valuation of as much as $1.6 billion. The company, led by 29-year-old Aaron Levie, is scheduled to price the offering on Jan. 22, after a roadshow to market the sale to investors and assess demand. The Los Altos, California-based company first decided to wait to go public amid a turn in the market for technology stocks last spring, people familiar with the situation said then. It raised about $150 million in July through private funding, giving it more flexibility for the timing of the IPO, and decided last fall to postpone until this year because of volatility, people said.

Box's valuation at the top end of the IPO price range is about 33 percent less than in the July funding round. Box was valued then at $2.4 billion by investors including TPG Capital and Coatue Management LLC, people familiar with the matter said at the time. "What Box did was transformative -- they were early in a growing space," said Steve Sarracino, founder of venture capital firm Activant Capital Group LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut. "Now, they're in a highly competitive and commodity business. They need to take what they have and provide more services and tools to make it more sticky" for their customers. Box is seeking as much as $163 million in the IPO, offering 12.5 million shares for $11 to $13 apiece, according to a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Box's platform, with 32 million registered users, allows companies to store content in the cloud. Major competitors that Box lists in the prospectus include Citrix Systems Inc., Dropbox Inc., EMC Corp., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Box intends to use most of the proceeds from the IPO for sales and marketing, product development, administrative costs and capital expenditures.