Texas-headquartered Cape employs around 15 members of staff, with four based in the UK, and offers a range of packaging design and pallet optimisation software.
The US developer’s Cape Pack toolkit already uses data from Esko’s ArtiosCAD structural design software, for calculation and simulation, while the software's reports can be managed with Esko’s WebCenter online packaging management platform.
Esko’s corporate marketing director Jef Stofels said: "There is a direct link with our software where it can take the data of whatever packaging it is producing and send it directly to the Cape system to estimate how it will fit on the pallet and how strong the boxes need to be. So it can be directly integrated.
"The software will remain on the market under the Cape name; we don’t want to dilute that. We also share a lot of common customers and suppliers so as far as the client is concerned, it is business as usual," he added.
Esko president and chief executive Carsten Knudsen said: "Cape has already made inroads in the brand owner and retailer packaging space. Adding their palletisation tools to our portfolio supports our strategic goals.
"We're determined to leverage the synergies this brings to our existing products and services, especially the sustainability benefits that integrating Cape’s technology into Esko solutions should provide our customers."
All staff and products will be integrated into the Belgian software developer’s business model by the end of September.
The value of the acquisition was not disclosed.
