Box Chief Invests in Supply Chain Software Company

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, is preparing to take his cloud storage company public.

But at the same time, he says he has identified the next new thing in technology.

Mr. Levie has joined other technology entrepreneurs in a $5 million financing round in Elementum, a start-up that makes cloud-based software for supply chain management

, the company announced on Tuesday. The investment follows a $44 million institutional round that Elementum announced in February after spinning off from Flextronics, a publicly traded supply chain company.

With the new money, Elementum says it has a valuation of $225 million. That amounts to a big bet that the company can attract more business customers with its slick set of apps.

“It seems like the absolute perfect time for the supply chain, and manufacturing broadly, to have the same move to the cloud that other industries have gone through,” Mr. Levie said in a recent interview. He compared Elementum to Workday, a cloud-based software company for human resources that has soared since its initial public offering in 2012.

David Duffield, the co-founder and co-chief executive of Workday, is among the investors in the latest financing round, as is Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder. Jim Davidson, the co-founder of the private equity firm Silver Lake, who is a member of Elementum’s board, is also investing.

With customers like Dyson, the vacuum maker, and Enphase, a company that makes technology for solar power, Elementum says it can improve the efficiency of supply chains and reduce costs. Its software lets businesses see graphical displays of their supply chain to identity any weak links and, Elementum says, get products out more quickly.

The company says it has 15 customers, more than double the number at this time last year. It would not disclose the revenue it makes from selling its software products.

Nader Mikhail, the chief executive, was formerly an executive at Flextronics, where he was asked to find innovative ways to improve supply chain management. He got seed funding from Flextronics to run Elementum as an independent unit within the company, ultimately spinning it off late last year. Flextronics, he says, is also a customer.

“We want to be the Workday of supply chain,” Mr. Mikhail said. “Or the Box of supply chain.”