Online storage providing company Box had its shares soar 65 percent when it debuted on the stock market on Friday, Jan. 23.
The company sold 12.5 million shares with each share set at $14. Gains in stock reached $9.23 and closed at $23.23, which gave the company a market value that reaches up to $2.7 billion.
The numbers had the Box executives celebrating at the New York Stock Exchange. Venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs also shared in the excitement and may have begun rethinking their own valuations and plans for IPOs.
"I've had two board members call me this morning, all excited," said Vineet Jain, chief executive of Egnyte Inc., a competing online storage providing firm. "It suddenly makes this category very exciting and puts a big spotlight on it."
Box has General Electric as one of its customers. However, the company is also situated in the competitive market for cloud storage, a field where other major players such as Microsoft, Google and Dropbox have already established their presence.
Although one day of trading is not yet enough to prove anything, the favorable response to what Box is selling can't be easily ignored. Some tech experts who were watching the IPO said that one of the things to watch out for in Box is the company's role in creating a new collaboration-centered type of enterprise.
Box CEO Aaron Levie claimed that the company is one of the first software companies based on the "consumerization model" to have gone public. The user experience and products it offers are more geared toward satisfying the wants of an individual even after the software is sold to the centralized IT system of the company.
"While we are part of this next generation of cloud companies defining the enterprise IT stack, we do focus on making sure we have incredibly easy end user functionality," said Levie. "I think of our business right now as still in Phase One."
Box has already outlined its plans for this phase. These include deploying big companies and storing their data securely, saving money and itself making more money, pushing for the company's migration to health care, and continuing to focus on machine learning as a form of investment.
"This is an important milestone, we can't possibly diminish this at all," said Levie. "But we are focusing on a long-lasting company, and we have a big vision of where we want to go. So it's a signpost we're passing through."
