Dropbox said Thursday it plans to buy Tigris Data for $350 million, a deal the company said would be its largest acquisition since it was founded in 2007. The purchase gives the San Francisco file-storage company a data storage platform aimed at developers whose applications run across multiple cloud providers. It comes as Dropbox says its AI strategy is undergoing a significant shift, moving beyond storing and sharing files into selling infrastructure for building AI applications.
Tigris, based in Sunnyvale, California, was founded in 2021 by former Uber engineers and has raised about $31.9 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its October 2025 Series A brought in $25 million led by Spark Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures participating; General Catalyst was an earlier backer. Co-founder and CEO Ovais Tariq told TechCrunch at the time of that round that the startup had grown 8x every year since its founding in November 2021. Tigris is building a network of localized data storage centers that it says can meet the distributed compute needs of modern AI workloads.
Alongside the acquisition announcement, Dropbox unveiled DBX Agent Cloud, which will initially offer standalone object storage, a way to store and retrieve large data collections such as images, video and the files used to train and run AI models. Eric Webster, Dropbox's chief business officer, said Tigris brings a product already running in production, an experienced team and established relationships with AI developers, and that the combination would accelerate Dropbox's entry into AI application infrastructure through DBX Agent Cloud.
Dropbox has made 35 known acquisitions, according to Crunchbase, with much of that activity in its earlier years. The company conducted 23 publicly reported acquisitions between 2012 and 2015, including nine in 2014 alone, compared with four across 2024 and 2025, averaging two per year, roughly 65% below its earlier pace. Recent purchases have focused on AI-powered productivity, search and security: Reclaim.ai and Nira in 2024, followed by Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs in 2025.
The Tigris deal would top earlier sizable purchases. Dropbox bought e-signature company HelloSign in 2019, document-sharing platform DocSend in 2021 and business forms provider FormSwift in 2022 for $230 million, $165 million and $95 million, respectively.
The AI infrastructure push is one part of a broader strategy that also adds AI capabilities to Dropbox's existing file-sharing product. Webster said the company is bringing AI directly to customers' Dropbox files to help them find, understand, create, edit and organize content, and that customers can switch between supported AI models and work with their files in tools like ChatGPT and Claude, with results returning to Dropbox. He described DBX Agent Cloud as opening a new developer and infrastructure market for Dropbox, while AI inside Dropbox is intended to deepen engagement, retention and expansion among existing customers.
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