Rossum, a cognitive capture software startup out of the Czech Republic, just closed a remarkable Series A round of $100 million to ramp up what it’s calling a cloud-based universal document gateway. To our knowledge this is the largest single investment ever into a capture software startup.
There is a boxing match this week between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder. But there is another equally heavyweight match lining up between Hyland and OpenText.
That is a tough pill to swallow for many enterprise software companies, but Box appears to be committed to it. From a buyer’s standpoint, it makes the platform attractive and predictable in terms of cost. From Box’s perspective, it means a short-term hit but much stickier and longer-term relationships with its subscription base.
Considering the sheer volume of startups and smaller legacy firms, there is no shortage to choose from, and the economies of scale can make many a target.
A cheap and straightforward to install and use blockchain add-on/plugin to systems like SharePoint and Salesforce. I rarely call out a specific vendor in an analyst note, and I only do so here to ask why it took so long?
One of the reasons eSignatures are not as widely used as they could be is the cost. Though Box’s announcement this week that they are essentially bundling this functionality for free in its platform takes that barrier away, at least for Box customers. But a more significant reason appears to be the complexity of configuring and using these systems.
In perhaps the ultimate cool endorsement, last week at WWDC Apple announced optical character recognition will be embedded in iOS 15. Named LiveText OCR, Apple describes it as “secure on-device intelligence to help you discover more in your photos, quickly find what you’re looking for, and relive special moments.”
You can read more about the arcane world of file migration in our recent report, but though this Analyst Note focuses on Box Shuttle, the fact is we are seeing a surge of interest across the board in moving files to the cloud. And that shift opens up a wide range of new opportunities and challenges for firms to adapt, and to innovate in ways they could not do while keeping files on-premises.
This past week, Utah-based NetDocuments ownership switched from Clearlake Capital Group to private equity firm Warburg Pincus, reportedly, for reportedly, over $1B documents. It’s an exciting move for NetDocuments, whom we know pretty well, for several reasons. Firstly, such a large deal will surprise many in the industry as NetDocuments, as the saying goes, flies beneath the radar.
But, this past week, fellow cloud file migration vendor, SeeUnity (based in Colorado), was acquired by Boston, based private equity-backed legal tech firm Anaqua.
