Dropbox Plans $350M Tigris Buy for AI Infrastructure Push

By Rebecca Stone

Dropbox announced Thursday that it plans to acquire Sunnyvale, California-based Tigris Data for $350 million, a transaction the company says would be its largest acquisition since its 2007 founding.

The proposed deal would push the San Francisco-based, publicly traded company beyond storing and sharing files into selling infrastructure that companies use to build AI applications. It would also give Dropbox a storage platform built for developers whose applications run across multiple cloud providers.

What does Tigris bring?

Founded by former Uber engineers, Tigris is building a network of localized data storage centers. The startup claims the network can meet the distributed compute needs of modern AI workloads; no capacity figure accompanies that claim in the announcement.

Tigris has raised about $31.9 million since its 2021 founding, 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; Basis Set also led the seed round, and General Catalyst was an earlier backer.

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 November 2021 founding.

Why does the acquisition size matter?\n

Dropbox has made 35 known acquisitions, according to Crunchbase, with much of that activity concentrated in earlier years. Between 2012 and 2015, it conducted 23 publicly reported acquisitions, including nine in 2014.

Across 2024 and 2025, Dropbox made four acquisitions, averaging two per year, roughly 65% below the 2012-2015 pace. The recent purchases point toward AI-powered productivity, search and security:

• 2024: Scheduling startup Reclaim.ai and document security company Nira.
• 2025: Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs.

Three earlier purchases had disclosed prices:

• 2019: E-signature company HelloSign, $230 million.
• 2021: Document-sharing platform DocSend, $165 million.
• 2022: Business forms provider FormSwift, $95 million.

What can DBX Agent Cloud sell?

Publicly traded 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. The product extends Dropbox’s storage capabilities into the infrastructure behind AI applications and agents.

Buying Tigris offers a faster route into that infrastructure market, which serves a different audience from the individuals and businesses using its file-sharing software.

“Tigris brings together a product already running in production, an experienced team, and established relationships with AI developers,” Dropbox chief business officer Eric Webster told Crunchbase News by email. “That combination would accelerate our entry into infrastructure for AI applications through DBX Agent Cloud.”

How will Dropbox split its AI strategy?

The company is pursuing two distinct paths. For existing customers, Dropbox is bringing AI directly to its files to help them find, understand, create, edit and organize content. Customers can switch between supported AI models and work with those files in tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, with results returning to Dropbox.

For companies and developers, DBX Agent Cloud extends Dropbox’s storage reach into the infrastructure layer behind AI applications and agents. Dropbox calls the wider move a significant shift in its AI strategy.

“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,” Webster said.

Going forward, the commercial test is whether Tigris’s production platform and established AI-developer relationships can win infrastructure customers quickly enough to justify the $350 million outlay after years of slower dealmaking.