Box, Inc. (Box) provides a ICM platform that enables organizations of all sizes to securely manage cloud content while allowing easy, secure access and sharing of this content from anywhere, on any device.
Box gives organizations a single platform for their unstructured data – which typically represents about 90% of all data within an organization. This data is content – from blueprints to wireframes, videos to documents, proprietary formats to PDFs – and it is the source of an organization’s u...
Box, Inc. (Box) provides a ICM platform that enables organizations of all sizes to securely manage cloud content while allowing easy, secure access and sharing of this content from anywhere, on any device.
Box gives organizations a single platform for their unstructured data – which typically represents about 90% of all data within an organization. This data is content – from blueprints to wireframes, videos to documents, proprietary formats to PDFs – and it is the source of an organization’s unique value. The Box ICM platform enables the company’s customers to securely manage the entire content lifecycle, from the moment a file is created or ingested to when it is shared, edited, published, approved, signed, classified, and retained. Box keeps content secure and compliant, while also allowing easy access and sharing of this content from anywhere, on any device – both within the organization and with external partners.
With the company’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, customers can work with their content as they need – from secure external collaboration and workspaces to e-signature processes and content workflows – improving employee productivity and accelerating business processes. IT teams can establish a space for compliant content management, and developers can easily create customized portals for white-labeled content collaboration. Administrators have a wide range of security, data protection, and compliance features they can activate to help meet legal and regulatory requirements, internal policies, and industry standards. The Box ICM platform enables a broad range of high-value business use cases and integrates with more than 1,500 leading business applications. With hundreds of file formats and media types supported, Box is compatible with multiple application environments, operating systems, and devices – ensuring that workers can securely access their critical business content whenever and wherever they need it.
The company’s go-to-market strategy includes selling the entire platform to an organization with the full set of Box capabilities. During that sales process, the company partners with IT decision makers (including CEOs, CIOs, CISOs, and IT Directors), as well as departmental and line of business leaders, to identify their content-oriented pain points. From there, the company works together to create joint success plans that define the path to Box implementations that meet the needs of the organization, including through the sale of its own consulting services, and in conjunction with partners. Between close partnerships with IT, line of business leaders, and end-user-driven bottoms-up adoption, it works with its customers to identify future opportunities using the Box ICM platform.
The company focuses its efforts on larger enterprises, capitalizes on international growth in key regions, and utilizes its partner ecosystem where most advantageous. In addition to its high-touch enterprise sales efforts, the company fields inbound inquiries and online sales opportunities through its proven self-service purchasing online platform. The company further expands its market reach by leveraging its network of channel partners that include both value-added resellers and systems integrators. Additionally, the company offers individuals a free version of Box that allows them to experience the Box ICM platform first-hand without commitment. Use of Box often spreads virally within and across organizations, as users adopt Box and invite new users to collaborate. This motion will often lead to an initial sale with an organization to unite their various users into an enterprise-governed implementation, and from there, the company continues its high-touch sales efforts, with a focus on use case expansion. Ultimately, the company's sales strategy is focused on ensuring that new and existing customers both understand and experience the transformative impact of Box.
The company has a rich technology partner ecosystem, offering integrations with partners, such as Adobe, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Guidewire, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, Oracle-NetSuite, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, USDM, and Zoom. This gives its customers seamless and secure access to their content across all their workflows and applications. In addition, in-house enterprise developers and independent software developers can use the company's developer platform and open application programming interfaces (APIs) to rapidly build and provision new applications that leverage and extend the core functionality of its services, increasingly with a focus on specific industries and vertical market use cases. To date, tens of thousands of third-party developers have leveraged the company's platform as the secure content layer for their applications.
The Box Solution
The company offers web, mobile, and desktop applications of its solution on a single platform, as well as the ability to develop custom applications. Four core capabilities differentiate Box from competitors: advanced data protection and compliance, modern workflow and collaboration experiences, a flexible and interoperable platform, and integration with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models. Box features and functionality include the following:
Advanced Data Protection and Compliance
Global Cloud Architecture: The company has built its platform from the ground up on a cloud-based architecture, which enables it to rapidly develop, update, and provision its services to users. The company's proprietary cloud architecture is particularly well-suited for today’s dynamically changing business requirements because it enables the use of the most up-to-date versions of its solutions and administrators to immediately apply changes in policies and controls across all their organization’s critical content simultaneously. The company's modern cloud infrastructure, supported by public cloud hosting services operated by third parties in various locations, also powers global scalability and reliability with minimal downtime for its customers, ensuring their business-critical content is always secure, compliant, and available.
Enterprise-Grade Security: The company has invested heavily to build robust, frictionless security features to protect its customers from the most pervasive security threats. At the most basic level, all files stored in Box are encrypted at rest and in transit. Box’s information rights management features enable secure access and management of files by providing granular control over users’ ability to access, view, download, edit, print, or share content. Box also provides security controls, such as multi-factor authentication, that ensure user identity when allowing access to content, as well as endpoint security tools to restrict access to only properly vetted devices. With Box KeySafe, organizations can implement higher levels of data security and protection by keeping control of the encryption keys that protect their content. This advanced encryption feature is valuable to many organizations, including those in highly regulated industries, such as financial services, health care, government, and legal.
Intelligent Threat Detection and Smart Access with Box Shield. Box Shield provides granular, near real-time threat detection and protection capabilities: Box Shield leverages advanced machine learning to scan files for sophisticated malware, (including ransomware), and identify suspicious user behavior to detect and prevent threats before they become data breaches. Box Shield reduces the risk of accidental data leakage through native security classifications and granular access controls and can automatically apply classification to content by identifying predefined attributes or personally identifiable information.
Comprehensive Data Governance Strategy: Box serves as a secure, centralized system of record for retaining content for operational use while supporting adherence to applicable laws and regulations. Box Governance allows administrators to manage the lifecycle of content and has robust integrations with leading eDiscovery vendors. Box Governance allows customers to create and manage retention policies with an automated disposition action to meet an enterprise's specific business needs and maintain compliance. With Box Governance, organizations can apply legal holds to preserve content and protect it from being deleted, helping customers to reduce legal risk.
Box Zones for In-Region Data Storage: Box Zones enables businesses around the globe to adopt Box as their modern content management platform by letting them store and manage their content locally in certain regions. This helps organizations address region-specific compliance mandates associated with data residency and privacy.
Content Migration: Box makes it easy for organizations to move their existing data to Box, no matter where it is currently stored. Box Shuttle is the company’s content migration tool, which enables petabyte-scale content migration from numerous source systems, including file servers, cloud sharing tools, and content management systems. Organizations can perform a full migration entirely within Box while leveraging advanced features such as in-depth analysis of existing data on third-party systems, migration simulations to verify configuration and mapping, retention of content features such as permissions and version history, and robust during- and post-migration analysis. For tailored migration needs, Box Consulting offers comprehensive migration services, from tool enablement to fully managed migrations – helping organizations get their content into Box.
Focus on Industry-Specific Capabilities: Box offers solutions for industry-specific content needs, especially in industries that have more complex content, compliance, and collaboration challenges. Box works to target specific business problems within these industries with a combination of Box and industry partner technologies, such as industry-specific tools like Guidewire's insurance platform and horizontal tools like Salesforce's customer relationship management platform. The company's platform can be configured to meet strict industry compliance requirements, like the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), GxP, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), State Risk and Authorization Management (StateRAMP), and more. The company offers implementation services through Box Consulting, as well as key industry-oriented partners. Some of the key industries the company serves include life sciences, financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, and public sectors.
Enterprise Administrative Controls: The company gives IT administrators with powerful enterprise-grade tools and automations to securely define access rights and permissions by users and groups, content type, devices, and business needs. Administrators can set specific content policies and restrictions, such as access by external groups, expiration dates to auto-delete files, or deactivate links to time-sensitive materials.
Reporting and Insights: All internal and external user activity and content interactions in Box can be tracked and is auditable by its customers’ authorized administrators through the Box Admin Console and via APIs, providing visibility into how enterprise content is being accessed, used, and shared across the content lifecycle. Administrators gain insights with easy-to-use dashboards, visualizations and calls to action for monitoring, reporting and mitigating risk.
Simple and Rapid Deployment: The company’s cloud-based software allows organizations to deploy its products and native integrations easily, quickly, and cost effectively. IT administrators can quickly add users and groups, set up permissions, migrate content, create folders and policies, and begin using its products almost immediately without the need to procure and provision hardware or install and configure software.
Modern Workflow and Collaboration Experiences
Intelligent, No-code Apps: With the general availability of Box Apps in January 2025, users has the flexibility to develop intelligent, no-code apps to accelerate mission-critical work throughout their business. Using the company's intuitive, no-code builder, both business process owners and IT can create purpose-built applications with custom dashboards, metadata views, and integrated content workflows. Box Apps brings together the right content, metadata, and workflows provisioned to the specific set of users who can use it to accelerate their daily work. Users can manage metadata at scale, leveraging AI to extract and validate metadata from content. With smart content processing, advanced search and retrieval capabilities, and seamless content workflows integration, Box Apps empowers its customers to work with content their way.
Connected Forms: With the general availability of Box Forms in February 2025, the company enables users to collect information and content needed for key business processes natively in Box. Users can quickly design, preview, and publish engaging web and mobile forms with an intuitive, drag-and-drop builder. Box Forms enables customization of form layouts, conditional logic, and corporate branding, ensuring a tailored and engaging end-user experience. Users can integrate these forms into appropriate downstream tasks, such as review and approval, document generation, and e-signature requests. By streamlining data collection and process automation, Box Forms supports key business functions, including vendor submissions, service requests, and client or project onboarding.
Automated Document Generation: With the general availability of Box Doc Gen in February 2025, users to dynamically generate documents on-demand by combining data from a variety of sources. Users can create templates to map data sources to predefined document tags, automating document creation at scale. Box Doc Gen is available in three modalities – natively in Box via Box Relay, through the Box for Salesforce managed package, and via Box APIs. These three modalities enable users to include document generation steps seamlessly within their existing workflows. Box Doc Gen also integrates with Box Sign, enabling seamless e-signature workflows, a common use case for document automation.
Electronic Signatures: Box Sign, the company's natively integrated e-signature capability, provides organizations with secure, seamless e-signature workflows, such as signing contracts, employment offers, or statements of work, right where their content lives – with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance built in. Box Sign offers a seamless signer and sender experience across web and mobile devices, with flexible template options, support for more than 20 languages, and additional security features, such as signer authentication and password protection. The company's native integration with Box Sign empowers customers to leverage its functionalities alongside Box Shield and Box Relay. Customers can deploy Shield's access policies to restrict signature requests to authorized users. They can also use Relay to streamline and automate post-signature workflows. The company also offers APIs that allow organizations to power e-signatures in their custom integrations and applications to embed e-signature workflows in common business processes. For life sciences customers, Box Sign, (as part of Box GxP Validation), supports compliance with 21 CFR Part 11 regulation for electronic signatures to address FDA-regulated use cases.
Automation and Workflow Management: Box Relay, the company's no-code process automation tool for content-centric workflows, enables users to build process automations in Box in a matter of minutes without writing code. Box Relay provides for hundreds of combinations of triggers and outcomes that enable a wide variety of file, folder, task, metadata, and e-signature actions, such as routing documents to specific folders, assigning tasks to individuals or teams, securing documents with watermarking and security classifications, dynamically naming files and folders at runtime, and managing metadata. In addition, the company provides a library of pre-built Box Relay workflow templates for users to get started quickly, and reporting capabilities to make it easy for users to track and manage their own workflows. Plus, Box Relay integrates with Box Shield to automatically secure content and with Box Sign to automate post-signature workflows.
Internal and External Collaboration: Box offers a core native collaboration experience enabling users to securely share, preview, and annotate files in Box from anywhere, on any device. Box has two primary ways to share files: by inviting collaborators and choosing between seven permission levels for their shared files and folders, and by leveraging secure shared links with access permissions. With Box Shield, users can assign access restrictions with Smart Access controls, such as download and print restrictions, based on the classification of the document, and administrators can set expiration dates for shared links. The company also has over 1,500 pre-built integrations, including Microsoft 365 (Office, Outlook), Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Apple iWork, allowing users to work together on a platform of their choice while managing content security and access permissions within Box.
Real-Time Collaboration, Content Authoring, and Coauthoring: The company's native content authoring tool, Box Notes, enables users to seamlessly share and collaborate in real-time with internal teams and external partners. Box Notes combines lightweight word processing functionality with easy-to-use tables, content organization, and commenting features to make it simple for users to work together on projects in real-time. The company's pre-built integrations with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace allow users to preview, open, create new, and co-author content in real-time in the application of their choice.
Intelligent Portals: In September 2024, the company announced the general availability of Box Hubs, which enables users to securely curate and publish content in centralized portals that can be shared across the organization – without needing IT or administrator resources. All content published in a Hub retains Box’s enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance capabilities, so that content is only made available to its intended audience.
Whiteboarding and Visual Collaboration: Box Canvas, the company’s native visual collaboration and white boarding tool, brings working together to life with new ways to connect, innovate, and share securely. Box Canvas offers a flexible, virtual environment where users can ideate, brainstorm and collaborate visually directly in Box.
Content Insights: Content Insights shows how each piece of content is being used, who is using it, and when it is being accessed. With easy-to-understand visualizations and the ability to filter and drill down to see performance over time, Content Insights provides users with a clear picture of content performance and gives them granular information needed to make data-driven decisions.
Mobility: With the Box Mobile application, users can securely access, manage, and share their content anytime and from anywhere, through native and web browser applications using nearly any device and a variety of operating systems, such as iOS and Android. The company’s mobile applications empower users to preview, comment, annotate, and collaborate on content from anywhere, and they make it easy to add content to Box with native scanning, uploading, and classification. With the Box for Vision Pro application, users can view and collaborate on media and 3D content using the Apple Vision Pro’s spatial computing workspace.
Elegant, Intuitive and User-Centric Interface: The company has designed an intuitive user experience that minimizes or eliminates the need for upfront training. The company’s focus on a simple and elegant interface, coupled with compelling access, sharing, and collaboration features, aims to foster rapid adoption and user engagement.
Handle Content of Nearly Any Type: Users can securely access, share, and collaborate on content, from virtually any device or operating system, across a wide-range of formats and file types, including large media files.
A Flexible and Interoperable Platform
Leading Pre-Built Integrations: Box provides a unified and secure content layer across the enterprise technology stack. The company offers more than 1,500 pre-built integrations with leading enterprise technology providers, including Adobe, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Guidewire, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, Oracle-NetSuite, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, USDM, and Zoom. The company’s integrations offer seamless interoperability that boosts user productivity and maintains enterprise security, privacy and compliance policies. To make the entire enterprise ecosystem more secure, the company continues to add or enhance integrations within its Box Trust Partner Program. The company also has a developer platform, a developer community, and robust set of APIs that provide organizations with the ability to build custom integrations and solution applications on Box.
Box Platform: The company provides a content Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product, known as Box Platform, which allows IT teams and third-party developers to extend the power of Box across their applications and build custom content experiences. With the company’s easy-to-use APIs, businesses can create a single source of truth for their content, allowing IT teams to deploy key business applications while easily managing how content is accessed, collaborated on, and secured. Coupled with the company’s robust developer tools, the Box Platform enables organizations to build applications faster, without having to invest in building their own content management infrastructure. The company also gives organizations the ability to extend its Box AI capabilities to power their third-party and customer applications, empowering even more industry and departmental use cases.
Integration with Advanced AI Models
AI Platform: Box AI is an AI content platform that natively integrates advanced AI models into the Box platform, enhancing how users work across the entire content journey, including collaboration, content generation, and content curation – all while maintaining the enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy of Box.
Security and Privacy: Box remains committed to complying with privacy, security, and applicable regulations by prioritizing the continued protection of both user and enterprise data. To ensure that all content processed by the company’s AI systems remains secure and confidential, encryption and data-security best practices are used to safeguard customer data. Box does not train AI models with customer content without the customer’s explicit authorization. Box also does not allow any partners or third parties to use customer data to train their models.
User Controls Enterprises are in full control of AI usage: Box AI is governed by Box’s built-in permissions and is designed to keep customers in control of their data so that users can only see and interact with the files and content they are allowed to access.
Reporting: Enterprises that use Box AI have access to usage reporting from the Admin Console, such as who in the organization has used Box AI, and how many AI queries have been used in the organization.
Model Neutrality: Box AI is platform-neutral, consistent with the Box platform, and is powered by AI models from various AI vendors to provide the best user experience for the company’s customers. For example, Box has announced partnerships with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Anthropic’s Claude and Amazon Titan via Amazon Bedrock. In the future, the company plans to enable customers to ‘bring your own model,’ or BYOM, should they choose not to leverage default models.
Intelligent Documents: With Box AI for Documents, users can ask questions about a document to quickly uncover key findings or summarize complex topics, such as generating insights from a report. With the provided answers, users can also view citations and audit the source of the AI-generated statement.
AI for Real-Time Collaboration: Box AI for Notes helps to increase productivity further, and users are able to create content from scratch, generate new material from existing information, or refine drafted material.
Intelligent Portals: Box Hubs, a portal for secure content creation and publishing – without needing IT or an administrator – is also available with Box AI. Using Box AI for Hubs, users can easily find answers to critical questions across multiple documents in Box and generate new content. All content published in a Hub will retain Box’s enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance capabilities, so that content is only made available to its intended audience.
AI APIs: In October 2024, the company announced the general availability of the Box AI API, which enables developers to integrate Box AI capabilities into custom applications, while maintaining the same enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy of Box. The Box AI API provides additional flexibility to customers by bringing AI to their existing applications, empowering even more industry and departmental use cases.
Metadata Extraction: With the general availability of Box AI for Metadata in February 2025, the company enables users to utilize industry-leading AI models to extract key information from their content. These enriched metadata insights enhance content classification, security, business decision-making, and workflow automation, streamlining critical business processes. Metadata extraction can be performed on demand by users with a single action or applied at scale via Box API, enriching the content with key information to drive mission-critical business processes. The company plans to continue enhancing metadata extraction with the intelligent document processing technology acquired from Alphamoon, to automate document-related tasks and extract valuable metadata from critical business content across a variety of industries.
AI Agents: With the general availability of Box AI Studio in January 2025, the company enables users to build, deploy, and manage custom AI agents to accelerate work. Agents can be quickly created and configured to use the latest AI models offered by trusted providers, customized to respond in precise, standardized formats, tested on a user’s Box content in a safe and secure playground, and deployed to specific users within an organization. Users can easily select the right agent with the built-in agent switcher to receive instant, relevant, and structured answers. These agents can be configured via the Box AI Studio user interface and Box API. Users can build industry and department-specific agents tailored to their business needs and integrate multiple AI models to optimize accuracy and efficiency.
Customers
As of January 31, 2025, the company had over 100,000 paying organizations, and its solution was offered in 25 languages. The company defines paying organizations as separate and distinct buying entities, such as a company, an educational or government institution, or a distinct business unit of a large corporation, that have entered into a subscription agreement with it to utilize its services. Organizations typically purchase the company's solution in the following ways: (i) employees in one or more small groups within the organization may individually purchase the service; (ii) organizations may purchase IT-sponsored, enterprise-level agreements with deployments for specific, targeted use cases ranging from tens to thousands of user seats; (iii) organizations may purchase IT-sponsored, enterprise-level agreements where the number of user seats sold is intended to accommodate and enable nearly all information workers within the organization in whatever use cases they desire to adopt over the term of the subscription; and (iv) organizations may purchase the company's Box Platform service to create custom business applications for their internal use and extended ecosystem of customers, suppliers, and partners.
The company has developed several programs designed to provide customers with service options to quickly get them up and running and enhance their usage of Box. These services include 24x7 support provided by the company’s Customer Success Management group and certain resellers; a professional services ecosystem that consists of the company’s Box Consulting team and system integrators that help customers implement cloud content management oriented use cases; a Customer Success Management group to assist customers in production; and an online community with self-service training materials, best practice guides and product documentation.
Sales and Marketing
The company offers its solution to customers as a subscription-based service, with subscription fees based on customer requirements, including the number of users and functionality deployed. The majority of the company’s customers subscribe to its service through one-year contracts, although the company also offers its services for terms ranging from one month to three years or more. The company typically invoices its customers at the beginning of the contract term, in multi-year, annual, quarterly or monthly installments.
The company employs a direct sales team to offer a higher touch experience. The company also makes it easy for users and organizations to subscribe to paid versions of the company’s service on its self-service web portal. The company’s sales team is composed of inside sales, outbound sales and field sales personnel who are generally organized by account size and geography, and/or major industry focus. The company also has a rich ecosystem of channel partners who expand the company’s reach to both large and small enterprises.
The company generates customer leads, accelerate sales opportunities and build brand awareness through its marketing programs and through the company’s strategic relationships. The company’s marketing programs target senior IT leaders, technology professionals and senior line of business leaders.
As a core part of the company’s strategy, the company has developed an ecosystem of partners to both broaden and complement the company’s application offerings and to provide a broad array of services that fall outside of Box’s areas of focus. These relationships include software and technology partners, as well as consulting and implementation services providers that enable Box to address a broader set of use cases for the company’s customers.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expenses were $264.9 million for the year ended January 31, 2025.
Competition
The company’s primary competitors in the content management market include, but are not limited to, Microsoft (SharePoint) and OpenText (Documentum). In the enterprise file sync and share market, the company’s primary competitors include, but are not limited to, Microsoft (OneDrive), Google (Drive) and, to a lesser extent, Dropbox.
Intellectual Property
As of January 31, 2025, the company’s patents were set to expire between 2028 and 2043.
History
The company was founded in 2005. The company was incorporated in 2005. The company was formerly known as Box.net, Inc. and changed its name to Box, Inc. in November 2011.
