Box goes global with London headquarters
Business-focused cloud service Box is taking the company international, with a new headquarters in London.
“We’ve seen some pretty significant traction there in the past couple of years,” Box founder and Chief Executive Aaron Levie told The Times.
The company plans to hire 20 employees by the end of the year and 100 employees across Europe by the end of 2013.
The office, which is up and running, will first be populated with four or five Box employees from the U.S., a sort of “DNA-injection team to build out the environment, to ensure the culture remains a cohesive” part of the Box family, Levie said. The company is actively looking to hire a sales and operations lead, he said.
Although, as a cloud-computing service provider, the company has clients all over the world -- a construction company in West Africa, small start-ups in France and one of the largest publishing houses in London -- Levie said it has plans to get a foothold in strategic locations around the world.
“Europe is where we’re seeing most demand,” Levie said about the first location in its global expansion. In 2013, Box will probably take what it’s learned in the London rollout and apply it to bases in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, he said.
The projection is to get to 30% of its revenue from Europe; about 15% is coming from the region now.
The servers will remain in the United States. Eventually, the company will establish “data residency” overseas, but over a longer horizon, Levie said.
In addition, Box now offers support in major languages, including British English, French, Italian and German.
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