Dropbox Acquires AI Storage Startup Tigris Data for $350 Million

Dropbox is acquiring Tigris Data for $350 million to build a storage platform for AI developers. Announced on Thursday, this marks Dropbox's largest acquisition since its founding in 2007 and extends its business beyond file sharing into the competitive AI infrastructure layer.

The deal accelerates Dropbox's strategy to serve developers building AI applications. The company simultaneously unveiled DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform designed for AI models and autonomous agents. This platform will initially offer standalone object storage compatible with Amazon S3 for storing large data collections used in AI training.

Tigris brings specialized AI storage technology

Tigris Data built a globally distributed object storage platform optimized for cloud-native AI workloads. Founded in November 2021 by former Uber engineers in Sunnyvale, California, the startup offers a network of localized data storage centers designed to handle the massive, distributed data requirements of modern AI training and inference.

The startup has raised $31.9 million since its founding. Its most recent round was a $25 million Series A in October 2025 led by Spark Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures. General Catalyst backed earlier rounds. Co-founder and CEO Ovais Tariq stated that "the startup had grown 8x every year since its founding in November 2021."

Dropbox plans to integrate Tigris's technology directly into DBX Agent Cloud. The platform targets developers whose applications require distributed compute across multiple cloud providers and will support AI agents managing documents, images, audio, and video. It will include filesystem features for agents to manage files and maintain task continuity.

Strategic fit with Dropbox's AI roadmap

The acquisition provides a production-ready product and an experienced team to accelerate Dropbox's entry into AI infrastructure. Eric Webster, Dropbox’s chief business officer, confirmed that Tigris brings established relationships with AI developers alongside its technology.

Internally, Dropbox is also embedding AI directly into its core file-sharing product to deepen engagement with its existing 700 million registered users. This allows customers to use supported AI models like ChatGPT and Claude directly on their Dropbox files, with results returning to the platform. The updated AI experience has already reached more than 70,000 teams.

Market context and scale

The $350 million deal represents a mid-tier transaction in the current wave of AI infrastructure consolidation. It surpasses the value of Dropbox's previous major acquisitions.

This is Dropbox's 35th known acquisition overall. Its pace has slowed recently; the company made four acquisitions in 2024 and 2025-Reclaim.ai, Nira, Promoted.ai, and Mobius Labs-averaging two per year. This is 65% below its peak activity between 2012 and 2015, when it made 23 acquisitions, including nine in 2014 alone.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. In a separate move, Dropbox plans to reduce its headcount by 9%, unrelated to the acquisition. DBX Agent Cloud will initially be available to Standard and Advanced customers in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, with broader availability planned for 2027.