Why Box is going after startups

If Box CEO Aaron Levie made one thing clear during the company's second annual developer conference Wednesday it's that startup developers should be paying very close attention to the cloud-based company.

To sweeten the pitch, the company not only unveiled a suite of new developer tools — including a "Developer Edition" of the platform — but announced new partnerships with two venture capital firms, who have pledged $40 million in funding to startups with Box-enabled services.

While startups may seem like an unlikely match for the company, which is still trying to prove it can meet investors' expectations, Box is hoping that powering a new generation of business software startups will strengthen the relationships it already has with its Fortune 500 and other larger business customers.

More than the promise of funding, or better technical tools, Box is betting that it's access to those much larger companies, which include the likes of General Electric, Eli Lilly and Chevron, will keep developers and startup founders on its platform. More importantly, these developers could help the company expand its reach far beyond the file storage service its known for.

For startups, the pitch goes something like this: You can not only use our platform to build your business but we can also help you sell your services to our large business customers.

For startups, the pitch goes something like this: You can not only use our platform to build your business but we can also help you sell your services to our large business customers.

"By working with the startup ecosystem, we can go to a large enterprise and say not only is Box for your secure collaboration and sharing, but use all these other applications to power other parts of your business," Levie tells Mashable." And those applications are going to be built on top of our platform so we think that there's a huge synergy between the two things."

This deal is also beneficial to the larger companies, as they look to stay relevant and keep up with Silicon Valley, Levie says.

"Most companies cannot afford to wait as long anymore and that's because of all these new competitive trends," he explains. "If you're a transportation company and you're competing now with Uber and all these other businesses, you can't afford to wait and find out what happens, you have to move more quickly. And you're going to need better technology."

Should longterm strategy go as planned — and it's too soon to tell if it will — then Box stands to be the underlying technology behind a lot more services than just document viewing or file sharing.

"In health care, in financial services, in retail, we'll be behind the scenes powering all new ways your business is operating," Levie says.

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