Box.net Announces Funding, 500K Registered Users
Marshall Kirkpatrick
41 comments »
Online storage company Box.net will announce today that it has taken $1.5 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and has crossed the 500,000 registered user number. The funding was already known about after it was included in an SEC filing in August.
Box.net previously received angel funding from a variety of people, including most notably Mark Cuban. (Update: Box.net bought out Cuban’s share of the company when they received this round of funding.) The company seeks to differentiate itself from the long list of other online storage services by positioning itself for collaboration. Multiple subusers can access a shared collaboration area, something that’s particularly appealing to SMB customers. The number of SMB customers relative to total paid customers appears to be about 25 to 30%.
Five hundred thousand registered users is a good number for a start up company that’s only seven months old. Box.net wouldn’t publicy state how many of those users are active and paid, which I find very frustrating. StreamLoad, an older company in the same space, says it has 4 million total users and will disclose that 25,000 of them have paid accounts. (In fact, that’s a number from several months ago and now that the company has entered into a number of big partnerships they no longer disclose paid user numbers.) Box.net has a much lower number of total accounts, but a significantly higher percentage of its accounts are paid. Streamload provides 25 GB of storage to free account holders, Box.net free accounts provide 1 GB of storage.
While Streamload has landed a number of B2B partnerships lately, Box.net highlights third party uses of its API to allow file access from inside sites like Netvibes. The company has provided group access to stored media files for events like BlogHer and Billboard’s “Mecca” event. Steve Rubel wrote last night about how challenged Tour De France winner Floyd Landis is also taking his legal and PR defense public by sharing legal documents in a publicly available box.net archive.
Box.net is a simple enough service to use that has a clear strategy (partnerships and collaboration), VC backing and a reasonable if ambiguous conversion rate from free to paid accounts. They probably stand a decent chance in the upcoming online storage wars.
I like box.net, it’s one of the few web2.0 services that I actually use. The interface is user friendly, they are reliable concerning up time and the service itself is robust. The only thing stopping me from getting a paid account is the upload speed which only reaches 50kb/s on my T1 connection. I also like the fact that they don’t tout buzzwords like “social networking” - I don’t want to be freakin’ social I just want to upload my files.
With xdrive and tons of other services offering the same service and 5GB for free, I seriously doubt they have 100K (assuming 20% of 500K users are paid) users paying $5/month. If they did, that would be $500K/month in revenue and getting a $1.5M investment would seem both unlikely and something they wouldn’t need.
It always sounds good to lie and stretch the numbers to make people think you’re making lots of money - gets you in the news stories like this one for example.
Box.net. Wow, what an awesome three-letter domain name for a company. Wonder how much they paid to get that domain?
No, they definitely don’t have 100k paying users. If Streamload had 4 million total users and 25k paid, that’s 0.6%. 0.6% of 500k total Box.net users would mean 3k paid users or $15k per month. Like I said in the post, Box.net has a higher paid user percentage that Streamload was reporting.
I like box.net and use it a lot, but the truth is they have not released the desktop sync software yet and after announcing in June that over the next two months they would “change the face of storage and sharing” and that we can expect “an evolutionary process” nothing much happened. Also the Firefox extension does not work with Firefox 2.0…
Hey JS - that ‘evolution’ took a little longer than expected - had a lot to do with infrastructure changes, hiring, etc. Feel free to email me and I’ll give you a closer look at what we’re working on.
Well I’ll use box.net when they cancel the 10 MB limit for file uploads.
I heard Mark Cuban pulled his money out of Box.net, can you verify this?
From what I’ve seen box.net has been around since January ‘05. So 500k users after 22 months is respectable, but nothing extroardinary.
Hey Tim - we were a pay-only service up until March 2006 - the 500k registrations have been since then - which was our official coming out.
I guess when every device and appliance is web-capable, and the thought of a WebFS hangs overhead, people will realize that a proprietary solution is not the right solution.
Just wanted to say that I’m not knocking box.net or the other services… Rather, if they used open and existing protocols, great things could happen in the next 5 to 10 years.
When I say “proprietary”, I simply mean that Amazon’s S3 API is different than box.net’s API, which is different from Streamload’s API. How can a user use a device (or appliance) seamlessly if they need to configure different API’s for each service?
I can’t decide whether or not to be amused by this, an announcement of major funding two days after Box.net ate one of my most important documents.
I heretell that a friend had the domain so they got it pretty cheap.
Great name for an online storage company.
I also don’t know how Mark C could have pulled back his investment. He did however put up enough money for a majority stake in FilesAnywhere which I found very interesting given the box investment.
1 gig is a bit paltry, though certainly enough for anybody to post music files from a local collection to share privately without the tedious ftp process or indie p2p tools, though pando and others have a better shot - imho - at taking a backdoor into collaboration….
and again, what are the odds that these firms will survive? with every major player developing online storage options, and no acquisition prospects, what’s the point?
I really like box.net. I always had problems with StreamLoad being offline, unresponsive or just plain buggy. Box.net seems solid, particularly since their recent upgrades in infrastructure. I hope they continue to add service plans that include more space ( as I have maxed mine out). In addition, a higher end SMB offering would be interesting.
Dave,
It’s about data access, control, and the fact that data should be universally accessible by everyone. Perhaps it’s not a good acquisition, but web-based storage IS the future.
We just need something to tie it all together, and we need these companies to be less proprietary. For example, the same devices that are designed to connect to GDrive should be able to connect to Box.net or Amazon S3 - no boundaries.
BTW… Google and Microsoft were never “acquired”
i wonder if they are counting all the fake accounts created so people could upgrade their own account to get more storage.
I love box.net in embedded in my netvibes homepage! Easy access to my files from anywhere.
Wow, 500k registered users ain’t bad!
Hey robert - I would love to chat about this with you.
BoxUser - yes, we saw this as an issue shortly after we launched the program; registrations from non-unique IPs and other suspicious registrations were not included in this number.
4M Streamload users sounds like the reason their support is only virtual and their download rates remind me the days of dial-up. Box.net looks neet and I have’nt tried it. They should maintain high service quality if they want to grow.
I personally am a big fan of Streamload - which has changed its name to MediaMax. There software is a little rough - but 100 times better than the original stuff (which was very bare bones). The web interface is decent and 25 GB is a nice chunk of space.
This blog post states that Box.net had 4600 paying members in Feb., 2006. http://undertheradarblog.com/2006/02/21/boxnet/
Their registrations have been closed off from a long time.
https://www.box.net/signup
Ah! damn
im from India and i always got a ‘registrations closed off for now’ message when i tried to signup.
i just checked the link again via a proxy and the signup page is on.
strange, box.net not for Indian users?
Gbaopan is the most popular web stroage provider in China which just hits 1 million users mark. Gbaopan.net is its english version which also provides 1G free storage. It is really a Web 2.0 service of an East flavor. It would be interesting to see whether people in the West like and accept it.
http://www.gbaopan.net (English)
http://www.gbaopan.com (Chinese)
I guess $1.5 million won’t help Box.net a lot, esp. they also bought the shares of Mark Cuban back… assume Cuban made some money, then Box.net is almost out of cash already and need for a second round funding very quickly.
Anyway, I am not a fan of Box.net. The thin feature and the kiddy interface is for teens, not for real businesses. For real businesses, DriveHQ is no doubt the best place to go. Their client software is generations ahead of Box.net, it supports group sharing, automatic backup and folder synchronization. These features are just amazingly well designed and easy-to-use. The web interface is also 10 times better than Box.net. From a usability / performance point of view, you can hardly put 100 files on Box.net, but you can easily copy 10,000 files to DriveHQ!
I use box and I have found it a little fustrating, particulary as I have a paid account I cannot now download the files and whats worse they have not responded to my emails for the last 4 days. Is it a case we have $1.5 million and we dont care!!!
@Stephen - Just shot you an email. In fact, this is one important spot the $1.5 is going towards: staffing! We’ve been just a small team for a while now, but we’re making all the necessary hires to respond to the demands (support, features, feedback) of a growing userbase. Thanks!
Thanks for the email Aaron, just want to put a positive comment up before I move on.
I do like box net and have passed on a few referals as I believe that having a virtual c drive is neccessary, I have lost so much data over the years with the odd virus and re install of windows.
So I will be glad when you get sorted with some extra staff, maybe I should offer my services.
Best of luck, I am staying all my hard drive says so.
Even though I don’t use it as importantly as most people (i usually use it to store files from school to finish at home) its still a good service for me, especially just typing in ‘box’ in my url and it coming up
Wish I had $1.5mil lol
I’ve been a box.net customer for maybe 6-9 months. I like ‘em. They’ve been very reliable for my needs.
The one annoyance I have with the service is the fact that yes, I can publish direct links to my files on a web site, but the file names are all converted to random hash characters. So my file ‘bobs_big_dj_mix.mp3′ becomes ‘xywhelrkjasdf.mp3′ or something similar. Kind of annoying.
When Mark Cuban completely bails on you, that is not a good sign:) Good luck
I have found that Box.Net is very useful for storage of important backups online and documents that I want to finish at home and vice versa. Thanks for a great online tool.