Box acquires Wagon to shore up its analytics products

Wagon, which allowed companies to see, explore, and collaborate on data, is shutting down

While Box made a name for itself as a place for enterprise businesses to easily store, and share, their content. The company wants to do deeper, though, and figure out how exactly those same companies are using that content. That means giving customers the best analytics possible.

That's why the company has acquired Wagon, a modern SQL editor for analysts and engineers to write queries, visualize results, and share data and charts.

While financial terms of the deal were disclosed, Wagon will be shutting down on October 3, it was revealed in a blog post from the Wagon team.  After that date, Wagon desktop and Web services will no longer be available, and all data and user accounts will be securely deleted. Until then, users will be able to export their queries and data.

The San Francisco-based Wagon offered a way to collaboratively create, visualize, and share data analysis. Users would import from anywhere, construct drag and drop charts, write custom SQL, build dashboards, and securely share them with their team. Essentially, it was providing a way for companies to create, visualize and share data analysis.

This acquisition seems to have been an acqui-hire, as the company said its team "will be focused on building new products at Box," specifically those having to do with analytics, but makes no mention of its technology. In all, seven members of the Wagon team will be joining Box.

The two companies have a common belief, "that shared knowledge empowers individuals and unites teams," said Wagon.

"Box helps enterprises do more with their content and get their work done faster by acting as the central, modern content platform. Fortune 500 companies across every industry trust Box to sit at the center of their businesses. We’re excited to build data analytics products at Box to help people understand their data and work better, together."

In his own blog post, Box founder and CEO Aaron Levie said that the Wagon team would help the company "build out our analytics platform to provide deeper insights that help customers make the most of Box."

"The Wagon team's deep engineering and product expertise in user experience, data modeling and quick visualizations complements our strength in analytics," he said.

This ix Box's first acquisition of the year, and its first since buying 3D technology company Verold all the way back in April of last year. 

Founded in 2014, Wagon had raised $2 million in venture funding from Labs8.

(Image source: wagonhq.com)