Australian document productivity company, Nitro has acquired doxIQ, enhancing its document analytics technology as the company begins transitioning from 10 years as the number one replacement for Adobe Acrobat to a cloud-based provider of Smart Document services.
“There’s way more to document productivity than just creating, editing, converting and signing PDF documents,” said Nitro founder and CEO Sam Chandler.
“Analytics and insights are essential to unleash the value locked in business documents today.”
What does doxIQ do?
doxIQ was started last year in Palo Alto, CA.
A graduate of Stanford’s StartX accelerator, the company’s technology has become a popular tool for converting marketing documents into intelligent web assets that increase conversion rates, collect behavioral data and send view alerts.
The company won the early stage start-up competition at GrowthBeat 2014, VentureBeat’s marketing tech conference.
“We saw a huge gap in the market for business document analytics akin to what Google provides for web traffic,” said doxIQ’s co-founder and CEO Michael Feng.
“Being part of Nitro will allow us to fulfill our shared vision for using machine intelligence to make working with documents more pleasant and productive.”
As it integrates doxIQ’s tech, Nitro will transition doxIQ customers to its doc sharing and e-signature product, Nitro Cloud. Feng will lead Nitro’s product management team.
Max Cantor, doxIQ’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, will lead Nitro’s research and development team. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
What does this acquisition mean for Nitro?
The acquisition will enable new document analytics features like tracking user interactions and time spent on specific document content in forthcoming updates to Nitro Cloud, its document sharing and electronic signature product.
In summary, with the DoxIQ tech, the Nitro Cloud product roadmap over the next year will evolve with a heavy emphasis on new analytics features.
doxIQ technology makes documents more like webpages, enabling more visibility of the interactions people have with a “smart document” at each stage of the process.
For Nitro Cloud, this technology means that documents and eSigning tools will become more intelligent – you’ll be able to see where people view the document, how long they have looked at it, where they spent the most time and the moment they exited the document. Valuable insights for knowledge workers seeking smarter document workflows.
What is the story behind Nitro?
Chandler founded Nitro in 2005 in Melbourne, Australia to disrupt the PDF market. The company quickly established itself as the No.1 alternative to Acrobat for creating, editing and converting PDF documents, and has been making similar inroads in the e-signature market in recent years.
Today, Nitro’s 200 employees help more than 500,000 businesses in 200 countries – including over half of the Fortune 500 – to improve document productivity and generates tens of millions in annual revenue.
“The problem is that PDF in many organisations has become a place where documents go to die,” said Chandler. “Document productivity and workflow is totally broken in the modern enterprise. We have to reinvent it so working with business documents is less painful and more intelligent.
“IDC has estimated that document challenges rob businesses of about one-fifth of their overall productivity. We’re on a mission to change that, and document analytics is central to our strategy.”
To transform how the world works with documents, Nitro closed a $15 million financing round last November with leading US venture capital firm Battery Ventures, bringing total venture funding to $21.6 million.
Today, Nitro is focused on making documents smarter with analytics that provide insights, such as how long someone looks at certain elements, where they focus longest, and where they bail out.
To help explain the technology and what the acquisition means for Nitro’s product journey, here’s an interview with Nitro founder and CEO Sam Chandler.
