Box Shares Soar 66% On Market Debut

(RTTNews) - Shares of Box, Inc. (BOX) soared 66 percent above the online-storage firm's initial pubic price on its market debut on Friday.

The stock closed at $23.23, up $9.23 or 65.93 percent on a volume of 42.59 million shares in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. The stock opened trading at $20.16.

Los Altos, California-based Box sold 12.5 million shares in its IPO at $14 each to raise $175 million, immediately giving it a market valuation of $1.67 billion based on the 119.47 million Class A and Class B common stock outstanding after the offering. The $14 pricing was above its initially estimated pricing range of $11 to $13 per share.

The company had filed an initial registration statement of Form S-1 with the SEC for a $250 million IPO on March 24, 2014. It then reduced the offering size to $150 million in an amended filing on July 7, 2014.

According to the filing, the offering is focused on increasing Box's capitalization and financial flexibility as well as creating a public market for its Class A common stock. The also said it intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures.

BoX was co-founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Box CFO Dylan Smith. Box's mission is to provide businesses and individuals with the simplest solution to share, access and manage their information.

Box provides a cloud-based, mobile-optimized Enterprise Content Collaboration platform that enables organizations of all sizes to easily and securely manage their content and collaborate internally and externally.

The market sees the debut of Box as a good start for it as a public company. The success of the Box IPO is also refreshing to Silicon Valley and the startup community in general.

The successful Box IPO will now spark a bull run of IPOs for technology companies in 2015, and market should be ready for an IPO onslaught.

A long list of other cloud-computing startups, including Cloudera Inc., Hootsuite Media Inc. and DocuSign Inc. are expected float IPOs as early as this year. The strong demand for Box IPO will also encourage startups like Apptio, Inc.