Startups & Funding
Dropbox buys Tigris Data for $350M in its largest deal yet
Dropbox is acquiring cloud storage company Tigris Data for $350 million, its largest acquisition to date, to strengthen the AI infrastructure behind its new DBX Agent Cloud platform.
Dropbox announced the deal Thursday, saying it expects it to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 and strengthen the AI infrastructure behind DBX Agent Cloud, a storage platform it is building for businesses and developers that create AI models and agents. The company told TechCrunch via email that it has no plans to cut headcount as part of the acquisition, which follows a 9% cut to its global workforce last month, according to The Wall Street Journal.
DBX Agent Cloud will start as a standalone object-storage product, letting businesses buy storage on its own and use it with existing tools built for Amazon S3. Dropbox plans to expand it further with support for different content types — documents, images, audio, and video — plus filesystem features that would let AI agents manage files and keep continuity across tasks and sessions.
Beyond infrastructure, Dropbox is layering AI into its core product: users will be able to prompt the AI to carry out tasks on their files, switch between AI models, and link Dropbox content to outside tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Muse. The company says this updated experience already reaches more than 70,000 teams, rolling out first to eligible Standard and Advanced customers in the US, UK, and Australia, with wider availability due in 2027.
Former Uber engineers who built that company’s storage infrastructure founded Tigris Data; its platform positions data close to the users and compute resources that need it, shortening access times and boosting performance. The startup raised $25 million in a Series A round last year. Tigris looks to be Dropbox’s biggest acquisition yet, but not its first bet on AI — the company has previously bought Reclaim.ai, Promoted.ai, and Mobius Labs.
Why it matters
Dropbox is betting that owning the storage layer AI agents run on — not just adding AI features to its own app — is the bigger opportunity, using its largest-ever acquisition to compete for infrastructure spending that would otherwise go to cloud providers built around Amazon S3.