BOX NYSE: BOX reported a stronger-than-expected start to fiscal 2027, with management pointing to growing adoption of its Enterprise Advanced offering and AI-driven content workflow products as key drivers of its results.
On the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Box Co-founder and CFO Dylan Smith said revenue rose 11% year over year to $306 million, or 10% in constant currency. He said the quarter marked Box’s fourth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth and its first double-digit growth rate since fiscal 2023. Billings totaled $255 million, up 5% year over year, or 13% in constant currency, exceeding the company’s expectations for low single-digit growth.
“Q1 was a very strong start to the year, highlighted by record Q1 bookings,” Smith said. He added that customers paying Box at least $100,000 annually grew 11% year over year, while suites customers accounted for 67% of revenue, up from 61% a year earlier.
Enterprise Advanced Gains Traction
Co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said Box is seeing continued adoption of its intelligent workflow solutions, particularly Enterprise Advanced and the Box AI platform. Enterprise Advanced combines capabilities including Box Agent, Box Extract, Box Automate and Box Apps.
Levie said Enterprise Advanced has now been in the market for a full year and is showing favorable customer trends. Its net retention rate was higher than Box’s overall net retention rate of 105%, and the offering continues to capture a 30% to 40% price premium over Enterprise Plus, according to the company.
Levie highlighted several customer examples, including a lending and financial services solutions provider that upgraded from Enterprise Plus to Enterprise Advanced to centralize trust and estate-related documents and use Box AI to extract metadata from legal documents. He also cited a new customer win in Europe, where a manufacturing company adopted Enterprise Advanced to manage and share documents, streamline collaboration and move away from fragmented systems.
Smith said Box’s overall net retention rate rose to 105% in the quarter, above the company’s guidance of 104% and up from 102% a year earlier. He said annualized full churn remained at 3%, and Box now expects to exit fiscal 2027 with a net retention rate of 105%.
AI and Agentic Workflows Remain Central to Strategy
Levie framed the quarter’s results around what he described as a shift toward “agentic” enterprise workflows, saying companies increasingly need to connect AI agents securely to unstructured data such as contracts, research materials, HR policies, marketing assets, product roadmaps and financial documents.
“Enterprise content sits at the center of every enterprise’s agentic strategy,” Levie said. He said Box’s opportunity is to help enterprises connect content securely to people, agents and applications.
In the quarter, Box delivered Box Agent and Box Automate. Levie described Box Agent as a unified AI engine that can search company files, analyze and synthesize data, and generate new content while following Box’s security, governance and permission controls. He said potential use cases include processing large document sets for mergers and acquisitions data rooms or contracts, responding to RFPs and creating sales presentations.
Box Automate, which became generally available during the quarter, is designed to route work across people, Box AI agents and enterprise systems. Levie said it can support workflows such as client onboarding, contract intelligence, brand asset approvals and life sciences research and development processes.
In response to analyst questions, Levie said adoption of advanced AI agents working with enterprise content remains early, but he cited document extraction as a “killer app” for enterprises with large volumes of contracts, invoices or financial documents. He said AI unit monetization is beginning to ramp, particularly for heavy workloads such as Box Extract.
Margins, Cash Flow and Capital Returns
Box reported gross margin of 81.5%, up 100 basis points from the prior-year period. Operating income was $85 million, producing an operating margin of 27.7%, or 28.1% in constant currency, above the company’s guidance of 27.5%. Earnings per share were $0.37, ahead of guidance of $0.36.
The company generated record free cash flow of $128 million and cash flow from operations of $140 million, up 8% and 10% year over year, respectively. Box ended the quarter with $479 million in cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investments.
Smith said Box repurchased 4.8 million shares during the quarter for approximately $114 million. As of April 30, 2026, the company had about $445 million remaining under its current share repurchase authorization, following a $500 million expansion announced in March.
Guidance Raised for Fiscal 2027
For the second quarter, Box expects revenue of approximately $319 million, representing about 9% year-over-year growth, or 10% in constant currency. The guidance includes an expected foreign exchange headwind of approximately 170 basis points. The company expects second-quarter billings growth in the low double digits, with a foreign exchange tailwind of about 140 basis points.
Box expects second-quarter gross margin of 81% to 81.5%, operating margin of approximately 28.5%, and EPS of approximately $0.39. The EPS outlook includes an expected $0.03 foreign exchange headwind.
For the full fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2027, Box raised its revenue outlook by $5 million to approximately $1.28 billion, representing 9% growth, or 10% in constant currency. Smith said that adjusting for currency movements, the updated outlook represents an $8.5 million increase from prior guidance. Box expects fiscal 2027 billings growth to be roughly in line with revenue growth.
The company maintained its full-year operating margin expectation at approximately 28%, or 28.7% in constant currency. It now expects fiscal 2027 EPS of approximately $1.56, or $1.64 in constant currency, and weighted average diluted shares of about 139 million.
Partnerships and Go-to-Market Focus
Levie said Box is expanding its partner ecosystem with AI labs, system integrators and hyperscalers. He noted Box’s work with NVIDIA NeMo, Claude, OpenShell and ServiceNow AI Agent Fabric, as well as its role as an early launch partner for AI model and agent platforms including GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, the OpenAI Agent SDK 2.0 and Gemini 3.5 Flash.
Levie also said Box is investing more in vertical go-to-market efforts across industries including financial services, life sciences, legal, media and entertainment, and the public sector. In response to an analyst question, he said the company is also focused on system integrators and hyperscalers, including opportunities tied to AWS and OpenAI.
“Demand is strong, pipeline is building, the conversations are fantastic, the momentum is absolutely building,” Levie said, while noting that customers will need time and partners to deploy AI at scale in their own environments.
About BOX NYSE: BOX
Box, Inc is a leading provider of cloud content management and file sharing solutions designed to support enterprises in securely managing, accessing and collaborating on digital content from anywhere. The company offers a unified platform that enables organizations to store, share and automate workflows across various departments, enhancing productivity and ensuring governance over sensitive information. Box's services are tailored to meet the needs of industries such as healthcare, financial services, government and media, where compliance and data security are paramount.
The core offerings of Box include its Content Cloud platform, which provides content collaboration, workflow automation, data classification and secure file sharing.
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