Box.net Wraps Up $48M Round Led by Meritech, Andreessen Horowitz, Emergence

Box.net raised $48 million in a Series D round in a show of just how much VCs are betting on the growing need of enterprises to share and manage business information in the cloud.

New investor Meritech Capital Partners is leading the round, with fellow new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners joining prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. The Series D round includes $38 million in equity financing and $10 million in debt funding from Hercules Technology Growth Capital.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which employs about 140, has now raised $80 million in total funding since it was founded in 2005, including most recently a $15 million Series C round led by Scale in April 2010.

“A lot of enterprise customers are coming on board, and the funding will help us continue to make push into the enterprise,” says co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie (pictured), who told me that among the company’s new corporate clients are Cisco Systems and DreamWorks Animation SKG.

I heard rumors that Box.net was looking to raise an additional round since Jan. 20, when the company, which competes again Microsoft Sharepoint, held a press event at its headquarters to show off its new user interface and announce partnerships with cloud vendors Netsuite and VMware, all in an attempt to emphasize its growth into the enterprise.

However, I didn’t realize the round would grow so large.

Jason Green, co-founder and general partner of Emergence and a new board observer of Box, told me that Box.net had to say “No” to investors in the Series D round, which is why the round grew so large.

Green said his firm had passed on Box.net earlier and that he and his partners didn’t want to make that mistake again.

“Box was mostly concentrated on small business when we last took a look at them,” Green says. “But they’ve nailed the enterprise.”

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