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Congratulations to Box as it crosses $1 Billion in annual revenue and joins the software Revenue Unicorns!

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Let's see what we can learn from Box's journey...

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Revenue Growth

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Box grew revenue in line with the median Revenue Unicorn below $250 Million and then displayed durability across economic cycles to reach $1 Billion.

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Gross Margin

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Box has a strong gross margin structure, nearly matching or exceeding the Revenue Unicorn median across each revenue range.

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Sales & Marketing

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Box invested heavily in sales and marketing early in its business lifecycle when compared to the Revenue Unicorn median. The Company demonstrated leverage in its sales and marketing spend with scale, eventually crossing below the Revenue Unicorn median. CrowdStrike and Palantir exhibited similar sales and marketing leverage with scale.

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Research & Development

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Box invested heavily in research and development early in the Company’s lifecycle and later exhibited leverage with its R&D spend at scale. DocuSign trended in a similar fashion to Box on its path to $1 Billion in annual revenue.

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General & Administrative

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Box’s general and administrative expenses converged with the median Revenue Unicorn as it approached $1 Billion in annual revenue.

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Stock Based Compensation

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Box had a higher SBC expense as a percentage of revenue compared to the Revenue Unicorn median through $500 Million in revenue. After $500 Million in revenue, its SBC expense as a percentage of revenue was roughly in line or lower than the Revenue Unicorn median. When viewing SBC expense as a percentage of enterprise value, Box is at 4.0%, which is close to triple the Revenue Unicorn median of 1.4% in the $1 Billion+ revenue range.

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Free Cash Flow

Box’s free cash flow margin improved with scale, revealing its operating leverage. Datadog, CrowdStrike, and Workday delivered a similar trend of improving free cash flow margin with business growth.

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Time to Reach $1 Billion in Revenue

Box reached $1 Billion in revenue after 17.25 years. This is longer than the median time of 11.25 years it took other Revenue Unicorns to reach the $1 Billion mark. Other Revenue Unicorns that took a similar amount of time to achieve the $1 Billion revenue threshold include Palantir (17.00 years) and Unity (16.75 years).

Other Revenue Unicorns founded around the same time as Box (2005 founding) include ServiceNow (2004), HubSpot (2005), Palo Alto Networks (2005), and Workday (2005). This set of companies took a median of 10.38 years to achieve $1 Billion in revenue (ServiceNow at 11.00 years, HubSpot at 15.50 years, Palo Alto Networks at 9.75 years, and Workday at 9.75 years).

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The Journey to $1 Billion in Revenue

For those of you that love data as much as we do, below is the full data set used for this analysis.

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Again, congratulations to the Box team! Stay tuned for the next Revenue Unicorn update.

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‍Note: The complete list of Revenue Unicorns used in the comparison can be found in the presentation here.

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About Box

As per the Company’s materials, Box is the Content Cloud: a single, secure, cloud-native platform for managing the entire content journey. The Company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith, Sam Ghods, and Jeffrey Queisser. The Box Content Cloud enables their customers to securely manage the entire content lifecycle, from the moment a file is created or ingested to when it’s shared, edited, published, approved, signed, classified, and retained. Box keeps content secure and compliant, while also allowing easy access and sharing of this content from anywhere, on any device – both within the organization and with external partners. With Box’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, users can collaborate on content both internally and with external parties, automate content-driven business processes, develop custom applications, and implement data protection, security, and compliance features to comply with legal and regulatory requirements, internal policies, and industry standards and regulations. The Box Content Cloud accelerates business processes, improves employee productivity, enables secure hybrid work, and protects an organization’s most valuable data.

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The Company reported $252 Million in first quarter revenue for the period ended April 30, 2023. Combined with results from the preceding quarters, this recent performance boosts Box across the $1 Billion in annual revenue threshold as measured on a last twelve month basis to become the latest software Revenue Unicorn.

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About the Revenue Unicorn Playbook

The Revenue Unicorn Playbook is an analytical guide that explores the growth of public software companies from $100 Million to $1 Billion in revenue. The goal of the Playbook is to offer founders and company leaders a framework to examine their growth and investments as they scale.

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You can find the original Revenue Unicorn article here and presentation here.

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The information provided herein is the opinion of Friends & Family Capital and does not reflect the view of any other person or entity. It is for informational purposes and should not be construed as an investment recommendation. Data sources include CapIQ and Wall Street research. Copyright © 2025, S&P Global Market Intelligence (and its affiliates, as applicable). Friends & Family Capital is an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.