Box Reaches Out To Developers With Tools And £27m Funding

Box is to offer new tools and funding to its development community in order to stimulate the creation of new software built on top of its cloud platform.

New SDKs and a Box Developer edition will be offered to developers, while the firm has enlisted the support of Bessemer Venture Partners and Emergence Capital, both of which have pledged to invest up to a combined $40 million (£26.5m) in software companies using Box.

The now-public Box has long touted the ability for companies to build on top of its cloud platform as a key differentiator from its rivals, many of whom it describes simply as file storage and sharing services. The cloud firm claims it has nearly 50,000 developers in its ecosystem and registers 4.5 billion API calls each month.

Box developers

“At Box, we’ve been working for over a decade to build just this platform,” said Box CEO Aaron Leive at the company’s BoxDev event. “And today at Box Dev, we’re announcing that the same technology that we use to power secure content sharing and collaboration for our 45,000 customers can be brought seamlessly into any application.”

“Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year on enterprise software, yet most of it is built for the analog business processes of yesterday. This is a massive opportunity for startups.”

The Box Developer Edition provides an independent instance of Box for app creators, allowing them to register individual users just for their own applications. It offers full enterprise functionality and authenticates with the Box platform.

The new modular SDKs are designed for app creation on mobile devices and are reusable components that use the Box UI and security features.  The content, preview, browse and share APIs should speed up the ability to add user authentication, preview permissions, collaboration and streamlined navigation more quickly and easily. Box also shared an updated version of its preview feature, showcasing 3D files, medical images and watermarking.

The importance of third party applications to Box was demonstrated by the launch of Box for Industry last year. Box for Industry combines Box’s collaboration, security, storage and metadata tools with applications created by third-party developers, curated according to the targeted industry.

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