Execs at $3.7 billion Box look for 4 things when buying a company, and its latest 12-person acquisition checked 'all the boxes'

Box

Nick Candito, left, cofounder and CEO of Progressly; and Box CEO Aaron Levie

• Box on Friday acquired Progressly's 12-person team to help build out its workflow automation offerings.
• The $3.7 billion cloud content management company is looking to expand its workflow tools, and Progressly seemed like a perfect fit, Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jeetu Patel said.
• Patel said Box looks for four things when acquiring a company, and Progressly checked "all the boxes."

Box may have made its start in cloud storage, but the $3.7 billion company wants to round out its offerings.

Toward that end, the company on Friday announced its acqui-hire of the 12-person team at Progressly, an operational performance management company. Box plans to use Progressly's team to help build out its workflow management features.

"We're doubling down on workflow within Box as the result of ... customer requests and customer demand," Jeetu Patel, chief product and strategy officer at Box, told Business Insider.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Box won't be using Progressly's existing service. Instead, it will integrate the company's team, which is headed by CEO and cofounder Nick Candito, into its own operations and have them design a new workflow automation process from scratch that will be built into Box's own service.

"We want to make sure that the experience is integrated into Box, so we're building the capabilities rather than going out and buying a technology and patching it," Patel said.

When it comes to building out its service, Box has done acqui-hires in the past and also "organically built out the teams," Patel said. Box chose to bring Progressly on board because it checked "all of the boxes" that company executives look for when bringing new teams in-house.

Box officials ask themselves a series of questions whenever they come across an interesting company, Patel said. Among them:

1. Do they share our obsession with design and simplicity?
2. Do they have expertise in an area we want to get into?
3. Do they understand enterprise customers?
4. Are they good fit culturally, in terms of their core values?

"When you start looking at those things, it was a fantastic fit," Patel said, adding that the Progressly team was so excited to start at Box that they forewent taking a couple of days off during the transition period.

Box hasn't set a timeline yet for when the new features will be available. But Patel said to expect big announcements at BoxWorks, the company's annual user conference in late August.