Box.net was launched in 2005 from a college dorm room, with big dreams and a zero budget. Its founder, Aaron Levie (who looks suspiciously like the actor who played Mark Zuckerburg in The Social Network) had a vision: he wanted to make computer-based data accessible from anywhere in the world. Along with co-founder Dylan Smith he’s doing just that, with the help of some serious cash from a group of enthusiastic and very generous backers.

Levie’s and Smith’s enterprise was recently the recipient of $81 million in funds from a group of investors that includes Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures and California based venture capital firm Andreeson Horowitz. That makes for a total of $160 million plus that supporters have poured into the upstart company, which has yet to turn a profit.

Levie and Smith have shown that they have a generous amount of hutzpah themselves. After turning down a $600 million takeover offer from Citrix, they’re now taking on the twin giants of the computer world, Apple and Microsoft.

Apple recently launched iCloud, its storage platform for iOS based devices. It offers 50 GB of storage for around a hundred dollars a year. In response, Box.net is also offering the same 50 GB to interested parties, including iOS users.

Their fee? Zip, nada, nothing. As Box.net’s social media manager Mark Saldana says, “it’s fifty gigabytes in the cloud, completely free forever.” What’s more, it can be accessed from mobile devices as well as laptop and desktop computers.

Levie recently called out Microsoft, as well as Oracle and IBM. The trio were subjects of one of his recent blog posts. Levie reviled the corporate behemoths as lacking innovation and focus in developing their cloud applications.

Nonetheless, he does realize the size of the competition he’s taking on. “What the big players may lack in innovation or focus, they make up for in muscle,” Levie noted. “Microsoft notoriously crushes competition on the third try.”

The college student turned entrepreneur may yet succeed in playing David to the Goliaths of the IT world, however. Box.net has been described as one of the fastest growing enterprise applications of all time, with a current customer base of 7,000,000 individuals and 100,000 businesses, and 250,000 new users joining up every month. With numbers like that, the big boys have to be wondering how long it will be before the dream that began in a college dorm room becomes their worst nightmare. Time will tell.

No related posts.