Inside Box’s I.P.O.

Cloud-based computing has been a hot area for deal makers, and a number of start-ups in the business are expected to go public this year.

Among the first is Box, which filed a prospectus on Monday evening to raise as much as $250 million in an initial public offering. A fund-raising round in December valued the company at $2 billion, but the I.P.O. is expected to give it a much higher valuation.

Yet Box also discloses in its filing: “We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.”

So what is the attraction? Quentin Hardy of The New York Times writes:

Box’s service â€" the ability to store and share files from both personal computers and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets â€" is a hot area in technology for businesses because it makes collaboration and information-sharing easier from any location.

Besides Box, companies like Dropbox, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all in the online storage business.

In its filing, Box, quoting the research firm IDC, said digital information was expected to grow 300-fold from 2005 to 2020, increasing demand for storage and content management businesses.

A number of leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms are backers of Box, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, U.S. Venture Partners and General Atlantic. One who will be on the sidelines, writes PandoDaily, is Mark Cuban, who wrote the first check for Box. Mr. Cuban made a $350,000 investment in 2005, but a year later, he disagreed with Box’s founder and chief executive, Aaron Levie, over the strategic course of the company and decided to sell out to Draper Fisher.

For TechCrunch, the “big surprise” in the I.P.O. filing is that Mr. Levie owns only 4.1 percent of Box. “The numbers reveal Levie sold off much of his start-up to raise the $414 million that funded Box’s rise to become an enterprise brand name.”

The single-digit ownership “tells one story â€" a story of grit, determination and ability to write his own destiny,”  writes Om Malik of GigaOM in a paen to Mr. Levie.

“He has sweated blood, cried dry tears and all the time has conducted business with a smile and a quip.”