Aaron Winsor Levie is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of the enterprise cloud company Box.

The idea for Box originated as a college business project that Levie was working on in 2004. The project examined cloud storage options for businesses, and after contacting several organizations to ask how they were storing their content and data, Levie concluded that the market was fragmented. He saw the opportunity to build an online file storage business as a way for people to access and store documents and files.

In December 2005, during his third year at USC, Levie took a leave of absence to launch Box (originally called box.net) with his friend and Box CFO, Dylan Smith, who was attending Duke University. At the time, Box was a storage service where users could pay to store their files in the cloud.

Levie and Smith incorporated Box in April 2005 while operating the company from Smith’s parents’ house in Mercer Island. Shortly after, they moved the company to Berkeley, California. Levie and Smith secured Box’s first angel investment from Texas billionaire Mark Cuban after sending him a cold email.

In 2007, as the consumer cloud storage market became increasingly crowded, Levie and Smith decided to shift Box from a consumer service to one focused on selling to businesses (cloud storage).

Box expanded its operations to Europe in 2012, with the opening of its first office in London, England.

In 2014, Box reported that 40% of Fortune 500 companies were paying Box customers. The company is headquartered in Redwood City and has been backed by several venture capital firms and investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Atlantic, Meritech Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, US Venture Partners, and Salesforce.com. The company filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2014. Citing market fluctuations, the company delayed its IPO until January 23, 2015.