Box acquires no-code document automation tool Crooze

Box Inc. has acquired Crooze Corp., a cloud document automation and content services platform, giving Box users more tools to manage enterprise documents.

The cloud document management company acquired Crooze, co-founded by ex-OpenText executives Alan Monier and Mark Lane, Tuesday for an undisclosed sum.

Crooze's products include tools to manage enterprise contracts, controlled documents and metadata. It also offers a no-code platform to build custom business process apps.

Early uses of Crooze's technologies include automated digital asset management through channels such as portal sites, metadata extraction and document library management.

Crooze, whose tools and services were built on the Box platform, had 55 of Box's largest enterprise subscribers among its customers, said Rand Wacker, vice president of product strategy at Box. The company hopes to open up Crooze functionality to thousands of Box customers.

Crooze's no-code platform is likely to be used by business analysts, consultants and process managers to build apps.

Wacker also said Crooze's tools are a good fit for integration with Box AI, a suite of generative AI features previewed last year that is in the process of being rolled out. Generating metadata with AI is of great interest to Box customers, Wacker said, because it's difficult for content managers to get employees to create it 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, but the user experience behind [manually tagging] metadata on uploads -- sorting through 30 different fields -- has been really, really poor," Wacker said. To ease that burden, Box has in development a document metadata extraction tool using Box AI.

Using that idea combined with Crooze's services, Box already has a functioning prototype of a contract metadata extraction -- in part, Wacker said, because Crooze was an early tester of Box AI.

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is a complicated content process that Crooze-Box integrations will likely streamline, said IDC analyst Holly Muscolino.

"Metadata is a key component of contract lifecycle management," Muscolino said. "Up to now, Box had many of the pieces for CLM, but Crooze's metadata tools help bring it all together."

Box's user-based content and data security policies will prevent employees from accessing sensitive data when using their companies' apps built with Crooze tools, Wacker said.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Wacker said Crooze customers would continue to be serviced as they were before, as Box integrates Crooze features into its platform. Pricing and roadmap details for Box customers will be revealed later this year.

Don Fluckinger covers digital experience management, end-user computing, CPUs and assorted other topics for TechTarget Editorial. Got a tip? Email him.