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Cash-burning Box makes yet ANOTHER IPO promise

Now, about those losses you keep posting

Loss-making VC muse Box.com, the cloud document storage and sharing startup, says it’s ready to make an IPO – again.

Box filed its IPO statement with US regulators on Friday in preparation for going public. The nine-year-old firm is gunning for a drop of up to 12.5 million shares at a price of $12 per share. Box stands to raise up to $150m.

Box was started in 2005 by UCLA dropout Aaron Levie, targeting the enterprise collaboration market rather than consumers.

On the cloud side it’s up against Dropbox – another hotly anticipated IPO candidate among the Silicon Valley crowd – plus online document storage and sharing services and tools from Microsoft and IBM among others.

Box has done nothing but record losses since 2005 – it lost $168m on revenues of $124m for the year to 31 January, 2014 – according to the IPO filing on Friday.

Box claims 44,000 organisations as paying customers and 32 million registered users versus 34,000 and 25 million in the IPO filing published in March 2014.

Between March last year, when it published its previous IPO documents, and the latest IPO statement, Box decided to swallow another round of VC money rather than go public, taking on $150m in cash from TPG Growth and Coatue Management. Box has slurped $561.1m in VC juice so far.

Just like last year, Box blamed its losses on investments in data centres and professional services. “We do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future,” Box warned – a sensible statement given its red-splattered accounts. ®

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