Box acquires 3D technology company Verold

Verold's tech will be integrated into the Box for Industries initiative

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Box is getting into the 3D game, by acquiring online visual editor Verold, it was announced on Tuesday. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Founded in 2010, Verold is a visual editor and platform service that allows Web developers to add interactive 3d content to the applications, games, and experiences they create. 

For example, educators can use the service to create 3D models for their students to engage with, or marketing and sales can use it to delivery more engaging product presentations, configurators, and campaigns. It can also be used by CG artists, and for 3D printing.

For Box, all of those different use cases, and potential verticals, are what seem to have made the company so interesting, especially as Box has begun to focus offering tailored products to specific verticals.

"The big picture is that Verold technology will be used to power preview of 3D assets within Box. And also that we will be part of the Box for Industries initiative, similar to what Box did with the MedXT acquisition for medical images," Ross McKegney, CEO of Verold, told me.

Box for Industries is the company's new strategy of targeting its product to specific industries, rather than offering a one-size fits all solution. The company initially outlined three specific verticals it would be targeting: healthcare, retail, and media & entertainment, before adding financial services in February.

"When we first started Box 10 years ago, we wanted to fundamentally change how people access information online and digitize their business processes. Today, we’re finding that nearly every industry is experiencing information-driven transformation in unique ways, and the acquisition of Verold will allow us to go even farther than ever imagined," Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, wrote in a blog post.

"At Box, we’re deeply invested in finding and developing industry-focused solutions to help businesses achieve their greatest ambitions. We’re also focused on building a platform that provides all-new use cases and capabilities for over 45,000 enterprise customers who choose Box because of our ability to balance security with a seamless user experience."

With Verold's technology, Box will be able to "unlock powerful, new approaches for previewing, annotating, and collaborating on mission-critical information."

For Verold, being acquired by Box gives the company the ability to provide its services on a much larger scale.

"I’m personally very excited to work with Aaron Levie and the Box team on this mission. Box has established an impressive user-base for secure content collaboration, and their next frontier is close to my heart: providing the solutions to transform how businesses across every industry work with their information," McKegney wrote in his own blog post. 

"We are a key component to enabling this transformation, and look forward to bringing our interactive 3D platform into the preview experience on the Box platform, and to the Box View API that will open up 3D and other data types to Box’s massive developer community."

What happens to Verold going forward is not entirely clear. McKegney told me that, "the roadmap is still being worked out," and in his blog post he said that the community would be updated with more information in the coming weeks. 

"Suffice it to say, if you use 3D content in your enterprise, we’re going to be giving you powerful new tools to streamline your workflows and turn that 3D content into interactive presentations."

This is Box's third acquisition of 2015. It previously purchased cloud management startup Airpost in January, and Subspace, a startup that helps IT departments enable employee productivity with secure collaboration and access to data on any device, in February. 

VatorNews has reached out to Box for more information on the purchase. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: box.com)