Box.net, a US-based cloud company initially funded from a garage on $8000 of poker winnings, gets corporate backing to take it to a reported $600m valuation, after being founded in 2005. Its chief executive is Aaron Levie (pictured).

The corporate venturing unit of SAP and Salesforce helped Box.net, a US-based cloud company, raise $81m yesterday.

SAP Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the Germany-based technology company, and the US-based cloud computing company were joined backing Box.net by venture firms Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA and Box.net’s existing investors, according to the company’s blog. News provider TechCrunch said the round gave Box.net a $600m valuation.

The latest round takes the company past $150m raised, and TechCrunch pins the total raised by the company at $162m.

Box.net raised $38m in equity and $10m in debt funding, in February 2011, from a pool of investors including venture capital firms Meritech Capital Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Emergence Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners, taking the firm’s funding to more than $70m, according to filings with US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Box.net works as an online content management and data storage available for both business and personal users. The funding coincides with a technical integration between Box.net and Salesforce’s business-based private network Salesforce Chatter, allowing Chatter users to collaborate using content on Box.net.

Venture capital news source Venturebeat reported last month that Box.net turned down an acquisition offer worth $500m from an unnamed entity, with a view to going public sometime in the near future.

Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box.net has written an interesting blog on why his company chose to raise so much money, because he expected and was already facing significant competition from technology incumbents. He said: "With this news, you might wonder: why raise that much capital? Well, it’s simple. The cloud has tipped for large organizations, and even the slowest-moving enterprise technology giants are waking up to this fact. Now is the time to scale."

Levie added the current mood has changed towards cloud computing amongst businesses and his business needed more money to compete with the large swathe of businesses . He said: "[Chief Information Officers] faced a critical decision about the future of their technology strategy: to go cloud, or not to go cloud. Heading into 2011, the number of CIOs deciding to go the no-more-infrastructure route accelerated dramatically, and we realized it was do or die, now or never."

The post also reveals Box.net was initially funded through $8000 of online poker winnings and the business had worked out of a garage.