By Corrie Driebusch, Douglas MacMillan and Telis Demos 

Shares of Box Inc. rose as much as 77% in their market debut Friday on the belief that the company can grow beyond the commodity business of online storage and into a more lucrative suite of tools tailored for industries such as health care and retail.

The stock--which trades under the symbol BOX--opened at $20.20 on the New York Stock Exchange, rose as high as $24.73 and recently traded at $23.40, up 67% from its initial public offering price of $14. Box sold 12.5 million shares at the $14 IPO price, which was above the expected price range of $11 to $13.

The pricing pegged Box's market capitalization at roughly $1.6 billion and raised $175 million in proceeds that will help the company support a high-cost business model dependent on sales and marketing.

Friday's stock-market debut comes roughly 10 months after the company publicly filed for an IPO. Those plans were postponed amid tepid demand for cloud-computing stocks, and in the ensuing months it turned to the private market to raise additional funding.

Box's success as a public company will hinge on its ability to differentiate its offering amid increasing competition from tech giants like Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., who have used their heft to offer online storage at ever-lower prices.

To do that, the 10-year-old company has built and acquired new tools to make it easier for employees within an organization to retrieve files and collaborate on documents. As it builds more of these tools, Box can go out to its customers and sell them more advanced services, said Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz.

"That's a perfectly viable model, assuming you get the upsell," said Mr. Koplowitz.

Box hopes to specialize in areas such as medicine. Last year, it acquired MedXT, an imaging technology that lets customers render and annotate medical images. Box has poached veteran executives from industries such as health care, law, retail and media to lead the company's expansion in those areas.

Chief Executive Aaron Levie said in December that his company is "just a couple months" into its strategy of building different services that cater to the unique needs of several different industries.

"We're starting to see that in each industry, the way you use data, the way you use information, the really transformational ways you use the cloud tend to be fairly different," Mr. Levie said.

The glare of Wall Street and growing pressure from competitors will challenge the company to move quickly.

Microsoft is going after Box with a beefed-up offering for its file-storage service OneDrive for Business, which offers enough storage space for roughly 200 high-definition digital movie downloads--at a lower monthly cost than Box. Amazon.com last summer also made available a Box-like service called Zocalo that the Seattle company has offered free for companies that buy Amazon's "virtual" computers for employees.

David Rudow, a senior equity research analyst at Thrivent Asset Management, said that while he believes Box has a first-mover advantage in cloud storage, he worries about the pressure the company could get from bigger players.

"It will be critical for Box to see how they differentiate themselves from everyone else and how they get out of the Microsoft shadow," he said.

Box will also need to show it can rein in costs over time without eating into growth. The company's loss in the third quarter ended Oct. 31 narrowed to $45.4 million from $51.4 million a year earlier, partly because of lower sales and marketing costs. But revenue growth slowed to 70% from 81% in the previous quarter.

Despite the concerns, the company's financing round over the summer valued Box at about $2.4 billion, according to Box's filings.

The largest investor in Box is venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which will own a 19.2% stake valued at $322.5 million. Mr. Levie's stake after the offering is 3.4%, worth about $57.2 million.

Box's IPO is being led by Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse Group AG and J.P. Morgan.

Shira Ovide contributed to this article.

Write to Corrie Driebusch at corrie.driebusch@wsj.com, Douglas MacMillan at douglas.macmillan@wsj.com and Telis Demos at telis.demos@wsj.com

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