Cloud content management company Box Inc. said today it has acquired the document automation and content services startup Crooze Corp. in order to offer its customers more tools for managing enterprise documents.

Box revealed the acquisition of Crooze, which was co-founded by former OpenText executives Alan Monier and Mark Lane, in a blog post authored by its chief executive Aaron Levie.

Box didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition, but said that Crooze customers would continue to be serviced as they were before. The company plans to announce its roadmap for integrating Crooze’s features within its platform later this year.

Crooze is a startup that has built various tools for managing enterprise contracts, controlled documents and document metadata. It also offers a no-code platform for building customized business process applications.

The startup says customers use its technologies to automate digital asset management via channels such as portal sites, metadata extraction and document library management.

Crooze, which was built solely for working with data in Box, counts 55 of Box’s largest enterprise subscribers as its customers. By acquiring Crooze, Box hopes to extend the startup’s features to thousands more customers.

Box Vice President of Product Strategy Rand Wacker told TechTarget that Crooze’s no-code app building platform is commonly used by business analysts, process managers and consultants. In addition, he said, Crooze’s suite is ideal for integration with Box AI, which offers numerous generative artificial intelligence capabilities. According to Wacker, the ability to generate metadata with AI is of great interest to Box users, because this is so difficult to create manually.

“I think a lot of content management systems have been held back by the fact that metadata is really critical for making them work,” Wacker said. “But the user experience behind tagging metadata on uploads – sorting through 30 different fields – has been really, really poor.”

To get around that, Box has used Crooze’s tools to build a document metadata extraction tool that incorporates Box AI’s capabilities. “By natively integrating Crooze technology and infusing the power of Box AI and the rest of the Content Cloud, we’ll reshape what enterprises can do with their content,” Levie said in the blog post.

Box’s user-based content and data security policies will stop employees from being able to access sensitive data when using applications built with Crooze’s no-code app development platform.

International Data Corp. analyst Holly Muscolino said organizations that want to modernize their approach to managing enterprise content would do well to consider the synergies provided by Box and Crooze. “Crooze’s no-code app builder and metadata capabilities further enhance the robust set of content services offered by the Box Content Cloud,” she said. “IDC research shows that organizations that invest in modernizing content management experience reduced business risk, improved decision-making and increased stakeholder satisfaction and engagement, including both customers and employees.”

Image: Box