Box has announced revenues up 28% year over year beating analyst expectations, with the company “well-positioned” to hit its $1 billion revenue target.
Total second quarter revenues for the cloud storage provider were at $122.9 million (£95.1m), with revenue for the six months ended July 31 at $240.1m. Billings for Q218 were at $139.5m, up 31% from this time last year.
Despite this, shares went down in the immediate aftermath of earnings being revealed, albeit having recovered somewhat at the time of publication. The company’s results showed it moved to cash flow negative $14.7m for the most recent quarter.
The company’s highlights this quarter include growing to more than 76,000 businesses as paying customers, including the Metropolitan Police and United Talent Agency, the launch of Box Drive, looking towards firms retiring legacy network file share infrastructure, as well as an expanded partnership with Microsoft focused on machine learning.
Speaking to analysts following the announcement, Box CEO Aaron Levie focused on the latter as a strategic trend for the company moving forward, citing the company’s integration with Google Cloud Vision for advanced image recognition capabilities as key to the move.
“We believe AI is the most important technology trend since the cloud, and has the potential to completely change the way that we work,” said Levie, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “To leverage the strength of AI in machine learning, technology providers need three key assets…you need a lot of data…you need the ability to be able to use and learn from that data…and you need frequent activity to be able to train your systems at scale.
“At Box, we are fortunate to have all three, with one of the largest corporate repositories of content in the world,” he added. “This materially separates Box from traditional on-premises content management and storage providers. In this context, our new integration with Google Vision is just the beginning.”
Box was last month also named as a leader in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for content collaboration platforms, previously enterprise file sync and share (EFSS).