Dropbox announced Thursday that it plans to acquire Tigris Data for $350 million, and the company told Crunchbase News the transaction would be its largest acquisition since Dropbox was founded in 2007, according to Crunchbase News.
Tigris is based in Sunnyvale, California, and was founded by former Uber engineers, according to Crunchbase News.
Tigris: localized storage for AI workloads
Tigris is building a network of localized data storage centers that it claims can meet the distributed compute needs of modern AI workloads, according to Crunchbase News.
Tigris has raised about $31.9 million since its founding in 2021, per Crunchbase data cited by Crunchbase News.
Its October 2025 Series A brought in $25 million from lead investor Spark Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures, which also led its seed round, according to Crunchbase News.
Other earlier backers include General Catalyst, according to Crunchbase News.
Co-founder and CEO Ovais Tariq told TechCrunch at the time of the Series A that the startup had grown 8x every year since its founding in November 2021, according to Crunchbase News.
Dropbox ties acquisition to AI infrastructure push
The planned deal would give Dropbox a storage platform built for developers whose applications run across multiple cloud providers, according to Crunchbase News.
The acquisition news coincides with what San Francisco-based Dropbox describes as “a significant shift” in its AI strategy, as it expands beyond storing and sharing files into selling the infrastructure that companies use to build AI applications, according to Crunchbase News.
Dropbox also unveiled DBX Agent Cloud, which will initially offer standalone object storage for storing and retrieving large collections of data, including images, video and the files used to train and run AI models, according to Crunchbase News.
Eric Webster, Dropbox’s chief business officer, told Crunchbase News via email that “Tigris brings together a product already running in production, an experienced team, and established relationships with AI developers,” and said that combination “would accelerate our entry into infrastructure for AI applications through DBX Agent Cloud,” according to Crunchbase News.
Acquisition pace and prior deal prices
Dropbox has made 35 known acquisitions, according to Crunchbase, as cited by Crunchbase News.
Between 2012 and 2015, Dropbox conducted 23 publicly reported acquisitions, including nine in 2014 alone, according to Crunchbase News.
Crunchbase News reported that Dropbox made four acquisitions across 2024 and 2025, averaging two per year, roughly 65% below its earlier pace.
Crunchbase News reported that Dropbox acquired scheduling startup Reclaim.ai and document security company Nira in 2024, followed by Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs in 2025.
Crunchbase News reported that Dropbox’s acquisitions of e-signature company HelloSign in 2019, document-sharing platform DocSend in 2021 and business forms provider FormSwift in 2022 had purchase prices of $230 million, $165 million and $95 million, respectively.
Two stated tracks for AI at Dropbox
Crunchbase News reported that Dropbox’s push into AI infrastructure is one part of a broader strategy that also includes adding AI capabilities to its existing file-sharing product.
For existing customers, Webster said Dropbox is bringing AI directly to customers’ Dropbox files to help them find, understand, create, edit and organize content, according to Crunchbase News.
Webster said customers can switch between supported AI models and work with their Dropbox files in tools like ChatGPT and Claude, with results returning to Dropbox, according to Crunchbase News.
For companies and developers, Crunchbase News reported that DBX Agent Cloud extends Dropbox’s storage capabilities to the infrastructure behind AI applications and agents.
Webster said, “DBX Agent Cloud opens a new developer and infrastructure market for Dropbox, while AI inside Dropbox is intended to deepen engagement, retention and expansion among existing customers,” according to Crunchbase News.
As widely known context, object storage is commonly used for large-scale unstructured data such as media files and machine learning datasets.
As widely known context, acquisitions are a frequent route for public software companies to add products and teams alongside internal product development.
