Dropbox has announced plans to acquire Tigris Data Inc as part of the company’s AI strategy, giving the company a better footing in the AI infrastructure space.
Tigris was founded by former Uber engineers and provides “a globally distributed, S3-compatible object storage platform purpose-built for AI.” The platform eliminates much of the challenges involved in managing replication and caching, giving customers low-latency access to AI workloads worldwide.
As one of the leading cloud storage platforms, Dropbox plans to integrate Tigris to better support companies as they build AI applications and use AI to access and better understand their content. The deal is valued at about $350 million and reportedly marks Dropbox’s largest acquisition to date, as WebProNews reported earlier.
“The value of AI depends on the content and context it can work with,” said Ashraf Alkarmi, co-CEO of Dropbox. “We’re bringing AI to the work people already keep in Dropbox and extending our storage expertise to companies building AI applications. Across both, our goal is to give customers the freedom to choose how they use AI while keeping control of the content they depend on.”
“Our customers depend on Tigris to keep their applications running, and their needs keep growing,” said Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris. “Dropbox brings nearly two decades of experience operating storage infrastructure at scale. Combining that experience with our product and close relationships with developers would help us support larger workloads while keeping our focus on reliability, developer experience, and direct technical collaboration.”
As part of the announcement, Dropbox also unveiled DBX Agent Cloud.
According to Dropbox, DBX Agent Cloud brings the company’s experience operating storage infrastructure at scale to companies and developers, starting with standalone object storage they can buy independently. The planned acquisition of Tigris would accelerate this expansion and advance Dropbox’s vision to be the trusted, independent content foundation for the AI era. The object storage offering is S3-compatible, allowing developers to use familiar tools and supported applications built for Amazon S3.
Dropbox describes DBX Agent Cloud as a storage and data layer designed to work alongside the clouds, compute providers, and developer platforms where customers already build and run their applications, with a focus on giving those applications a consistent home for their content wherever they run.
“AI is driving storage demand at a scale this industry has not seen before. Meeting it takes massive scale and a conviction we share with Dropbox: that customers should have the flexibility to run their compute wherever it serves them best, with a product built for developers and agents alike,” said Tariq. “Dropbox brings nearly two decades of operating storage at that scale. We bring the developer-focused product our customers depend on. Together we would meet that demand across the industry, and deliver the capabilities that come next, starting with filesystem and content processing.”
Dropbox says the new Dropbox experience has already rolled out to more than 70,000 teams, starting with eligible Standard and Advanced teams in the US, UK, and Australia in English. Broader availability is planned for 2027.