Box reported Q2 with $321.1 million revenue, up 9% (11% constant currency). The story is in the billings: up 17% to $309.5 million against guidance of low double digits. Last quarter billings grew 5%.
That eight-point spread between billings and revenue is what repricing looks like under ratable accounting. Customers signed bigger contracts in Q2. Box invoiced them. The revenue gets recognised over the next two to three years. For founders repackaging around AI right now, the sequence is billings first, then RPO, then revenue. Box's revenue line reflects deals signed in FY26. The billings line reflects deals signed in the last 90 days, running eight points hotter.
Net revenue retention went from 103% to 105% to 106% over three quarters. That is $38 million of annualised revenue Box did not acquire with headcount. Sales and marketing spend grew 4.4% while revenue grew 9.2%. S&M fell from 34.8% of revenue to 33.2%. Three points of NRR improvement came from price and packaging applied to existing customers.
106% is a solid number for Box and middling in absolute terms. The repricing pulled retention out of the low 100s and plateaued. Consumption-priced competitors like Snowflake post 126%.
AI cost Box 20 basis points of gross margin. Non-GAAP gross margin dropped from 81.4% to 81.2%. Compare that to Figma, which lost five full points on AI credit costs. Box does not buy the inference. It charges to be the governed content layer that other companies' models read from. This quarter Box was a launch partner for Anthropic Opus 5, Google Gemini 3.7 Flash, OpenAI GPT-5.6, Meta Muse Spark 1.1. Several of those are competitors' agents reading Box content, with the token bill landing on the competitor.
Box shipped agent guardrails, prompt injection detection, MCP-scoped permissions, agent classification policies, and agent audit trails in Q2. All of it sits behind the Enterprise Advanced tier. Charging a premium for governing somebody else's agents carries no inference cost.
For ANZ context: Box has a Sydney office and dedicated regional leadership since 2018. The company employs about 2,200 people globally, with ANZ likely a focused enterprise motion rather than a large field org. The metrics here matter for ANZ sales leaders tracking how mature SaaS vendors balance growth, efficiency, and AI margin pressure.
One other number: the buyback delivered 43% of the EPS growth. Non-GAAP EPS went from $0.33 to $0.40, up 21%. Revenue grew 9%. Non-GAAP net income grew 12%. Diluted shares dropped 7.5%. Box repurchased 2.6 million shares for $66 million in Q2. Held at last year's share count, that $0.40 would have been $0.37.