Dropbox said Thursday it will acquire Tigris Data for $350 million, a deal the company told Crunchbase News would be its largest since it was founded in 2007. TechCrunch reported the transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 and that Dropbox does not plan to cut jobs because of the acquisition. Dropbox cut 9% of its global workforce last month, the Wall Street Journal reported, according to TechCrunch.
Tigris Data, founded by former Uber engineers and based in Sunnyvale, California, operates local data storage centers that it says are designed for the distributed computing demands of AI workloads. It has raised about $31.9 million since 2021, including a $25 million Series A in October 2025 from Spark Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures also participating, according to Crunchbase data. When it raised its Series A, Tigris CEO Ovais Tariq told TechCrunch that the startup had grown eightfold each year since launching in November 2021. TechCrunch wrote that Tigris's technology automatically places data near the users and computing resources that require it to improve performance.
Crunchbase News reported that the planned deal would give Dropbox a storage platform for developers whose applications run across multiple cloud providers. Dropbox also introduced DBX Agent Cloud, which will start by offering standalone object storage. TechCrunch reported that the service will be compatible with existing tools built for Amazon S3. Dropbox plans to expand DBX Agent Cloud with additional capabilities to help AI systems work with documents, images, audio, and video, and with filesystem features that let AI agents manage files and maintain continuity across tasks and sessions, TechCrunch reported.
Eric Webster, Dropbox's chief business officer, said via email: "Tigris brings together a product already running in production, an experienced team, and established relationships with AI developers. That combination would accelerate our entry into infrastructure for AI applications through DBX Agent Cloud."
Dropbox is adding AI to its file-sharing product for current customers, letting them use their files with tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Muse, according to TechCrunch. The company said the updated experience has already reached more than 70,000 teams, with initial availability for eligible Standard and Advanced customers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia and broader availability planned for 2027, according to TechCrunch.
Dropbox's AI strategy also includes a new infrastructure market for developers, 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," he told Crunchbase News.
Dropbox has made 35 known acquisitions, according to Crunchbase, but its pace slowed to four deals across 2024 and 2025, compared with 23 between 2012 and 2015. Recent acquisitions include the scheduling startup Reclaim.ai and document security firm Nira in 2024, followed by Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs in 2025, according to Crunchbase News. The Tigris deal would be larger than previous purchases including HelloSign for $230 million in 2019, DocSend for $165 million in 2021 and FormSwift for $95 million in 2022.
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Nina Castell covers startups, funding rounds and acquisitions for Venturist. She writes from company announcements, filings and published reporting.