Box Tries to Make a Comeback, Acquires Streem
It is no secret that Box has been struggling recently: growing fast, but losing money even faster. After taking the cloud industry by storm, Box became one of the foremost storage providers after only eight years. Yet, it was reported that in the last fiscal year, Box’s losses far outstripped its revenue.
Yesterday, they made a move that will hopefully turn everything around. Aaron Levie posted on the Box blog that they have acquired San Fransisco based Streem.
He wrote, “The entire team at Streem will be joining Box to help work on the future of content management and collaboration in the enterprise…For customers across data-intensive industries like Media & Entertainment, Oil & Gas, Healthcare, and Manufacturing, this means instant access to far larger volumes of data than what your local drives can support. For enterprises in regulated industries like Life Sciences and Financial Services, it means better protection and control of information and where it lives.”
Streem is a Y-Combinator-backed startup that is only two years old. It offers cloud storage in the style of an online hard-drive for desktops called StreemFS. Streem launched with the premise that all “files are opened natively on the device, requiring no special software, configuration, or any change in the consumer’s behavior.”
This is a big step for Box as their pervious lack of support for desktops was one of their major shortcomings. Streem’s platform is specially designed for this exact purpose. On their website they write, users are able to “natively access files in the cloud right on their desktop.”
