Box acqui-hires Folders to broaden iPhone, iPad offering
Box announced on its blog on Thursday it has acquired Folders, an app for Apple's iOS, which will be part of a push by the cloud service to further bolster its mobile offering.
As part of the deal, the enterprise cloud storage firm has also hired Folders' developer Martin Destagnol to help integrate his product into Box's iOS app.
Folders currently works on iOS, allowing users to open non-native files on their iPhones and iPads. Users can manage multiple accounts — such as Google Drive and Dropbox — and copy, move, transfer, search, sort and email files very easily. With a slick user interface and a bevy of functionality, it shows that Box is keen to increase not only its feature base with the Folders buy, but also to further bolster its user aesthetic.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Box vice president of engineering Sam Schillace said there were "many factors," but it boiled down to the "amazing impact" that the products had on the overall Box user experience.
He added that Box's mission was to make enterprise software that "doesn't suck," while making its applications as user friendly, refined, and as innovative as they can be.
The company said it has 15 million people at 150,000 businesses using the enterprise service.
The deal, announced on Thursday, marks Box's third acquisition to date. It comes just two weeks after Box said it was acquiring Crocodoc, a HTML5 document embedding service that converts Microsoft Office and PDF files to the Web standard.