Cloud content management company Box Inc. today announced the acquisition of the artificial intelligence-powered document processing firm Alphamoon in a move aimed at bolstering the company’s AI strategy.

Box did not disclose the terms of the acquisition but said it will allow the company to expand the capabilities of its Box Intelligent Content Cloud by integrating Alphamoon’s AI technology with Box’s existing AI capabilities.

The core role of cloud content management, Box said, is the ability to understand the nature of documents within it and producing proper metadata to tag and understand enterprise content. That includes contracts containing critical metadata such as party names, renewal dates and key terms. Document types can include invoices with amounts, addresses and product details, and bank statements filled with client details, balances and other critical information.

All of this data lacks easy-to-define structures and can be written in different formats. Historically it has been complex and difficult to categorize and extract metadata for these types of documents at large scale.

Poland-based Alphamoon’s intelligent document processing technology, or IDP, assists with extracting metadata by running the information through powerful AI models and makes complex problems at scale easy and efficient. Its technology targets customers in financial services, legal, healthcare and government agencies that work with these documents and helps make them more searchable and accessible for traditional and AI systems.

This includes optical recognition technology that allows businesses to scan paper documents quickly and make them digital. As a result, Box customers will gain the ability to get boxes and sheets of documents online rapidly that otherwise require humans to tediously enter or sit in warehouses and back rooms collecting dust.

Box said the acquisition will significantly speed up the company’s development of its own intelligent metadata extraction capability. The company recently acquired Crooze Corp., a document automation and content services startup, to help customers manage enterprise documents.

Crooze built tools for managing enterprise contracts, controlled documents and document metadata. Its technology automates digital asset management through channels such as portal sites, document libraries and metadata extraction.

“Intelligent data processing remains a critical origination point for increasingly complex document workflow using intelligent capture paired with automation,” said Amy Machado, senior research manager for enterprise management and workplace strategies at IDC. “To enable automation, organizations need a high level of accuracy, usability and flexibility to support their diversity of documents and custom business requirements. With the Alphamoon acquisition, Box now has a complete end-to-end solution, unlike the pure-play IDP vendors.”

The company has aggressively focused on embracing AI-powered enhancements, including announcing an upcoming integration with powerful AI models such as OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4o. The acquisitions of Alphamoon’s IDP technology and Crooze cement this strategy.

In an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Google Cloud Next 2024 in April, Box Chief Technology Officer Ben Kus said the future of enterprise content management hinges on effectively using AI and cloud technology:

“Now you can actually start to have AI understand things the way that humans would, and that then changes really what people can do with their content overall,” Kus said. “We have 100,000 enterprise customers. We store hundreds of billions of these files. And now AI is a big part of that.”

Alongside integrating Alphamoon’s IDP technology into Box AI, the company said that it will take the former’s team into the fold as well.

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