Dropbox bets $350 million on Tigris Data to build AI storage

Dropbox is spending approximately $350 million in cash to buy Tigris Data, a young cloud storage startup built for AI workloads.

According to TechCrunch, the deal appears to be the largest acquisition Dropbox has ever made. Research on the transaction describes it as the company’s most significant purchase since its founding in 2007.

What Dropbox is buying

Tigris Data is based in Sunnyvale, California. Former Uber engineers founded it in November 2021.

The startup runs a globally distributed object storage platform designed with AI use cases in mind. Object storage is the warehouse model of data storage: each file goes into a big bin with a label, rather than a nested folder tree.

Tigris is also S3-compatible. That means software already written to work with Amazon’s widely used S3 storage interface can plug into Tigris without a rewrite.

Tigris lets customers store and access data across multiple cloud environments without getting locked into one vendor or paying egress fees.

Egress fees are the charges some cloud providers levy when you move your data out. For AI developers shuffling huge piles of images, videos and training data between services, those exit charges can add up.

The price tag and the backers

Tigris has raised around $31.9 million since launch. That includes a $25 million Series A round in October 2025.

Spark Capital led that Series A. Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures also participated.

The deal was announced Thursday, November 5, 2026. Dropbox told TechCrunch by email that it expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions.

Enter DBX Agent Cloud

The acquisition is meant to support a new product called DBX Agent Cloud. It is a storage platform aimed at businesses and developers building AI models and AI agents.

At launch, DBX Agent Cloud will initially offer standalone object storage for those developers.

Alongside the deal, Dropbox also announced new AI-powered features for its existing products. Those features are set to reach more than 70,000 teams across the US, the UK and Australia.

Why Dropbox is making this move

Dropbox, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker DBX, has spent years as a household name in consumer and team file storage. Training and running models means handling vast datasets, including images, video and training files, often spread across several cloud providers.

Rather than build a new AI storage stack from scratch, Dropbox is buying one that already exists.