Aaron Levie: Box Now Has 140K Active Businesses, 14M Users, 92% Of Fortune 500

Aaron Levie took the stage at the second annual BoxWorks developer conference in San Francisco today to talk about how Box is faring against competition from the likes of Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive, Dropbox and Egnyte, among others.

After arriving on stage to Gangnam Style and dropping a few gems (“last week Oracle finally noticed the cloud. Larry Ellison joined Twitter, sent 1 tweet, and celebrated by buying an island”), the Box CEO dropped some updates on the company’s metrics, giving a quick snapshot of its growth over the last year.

The most significant milestones we caught: Box now has more than 140,000 active businesses using its products, which includes 92 percent of the Fortune 500 and 14 million total users. For context, it’s worth noting that this time last year, around the time of BoxWorks v1, the company was at 7 million users. After crunching some numbers on my graphing calculator, we can safely conclude that Box’s user base has doubled over the course of the year.

In addition to that, 14,000 developers are now using Box’s open platform, with the company now seeing 500 million API calls each month. Some other noteworthy stats: Box has seen a 10-fold increase in iOS usage and a 30-fold increase in Android usage over the past year.

Levie qualified this data by saying that “Box just works faster than the competition, and as much as 10 times faster in Tokyo,” which he then punctuated by saying that this part was “vague but there is a pretty map.” He then showed a pretty map.

What’s not so vague: Box has seen a 72 percent increase in the number of businesses that have adopted the product throughout the enterprise. This up-sell and increasing adoption and retention is good news for Box, an exclamation point on the company’s reported $125 million raise this summer at an estimated $1.2 billion valuation. All of which seems to indicate that the company has one destination in mind: An IPO.