Dropbox plans $350M AI infrastructure deal with Tigris buy, its biggest acquisition yet
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Dropbox announced Thursday plans to acquire Tigris Data for $350 million in a transaction the company told Crunchbase News would mark its largest acquisition since its founding in 2007.
Founded by formerUber engineers, Sunnyvale, California-based Tigris is building a network of localized data storage centers that it claims can meet the distributed compute needs of modern AI workloads.
Tigris has raised about $31.9 million since its founding in 2021, per Crunchbase data. Its October 2025 Series A brought in $25 million from lead investorSpark Capital, with participation fromAndreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures, which also led its seed round. Other earlier backers includeGeneral Catalyst.
Co-founder and CEO Ovais Tariq told TechCrunch at the time of its Series A that the startup had grown 8x every year since its founding in November 2021.
The planned deal would give Dropbox a storage platform built for developers whose applications run across multiple cloud providers.
A push into AI infrastructure
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.
Publicly traded Dropbox also unveiled DBX Agent Cloud, which will initially offer standalone object storage — a way to store and retrieve large collections of data, including images, video and the files used to train and run AI models.
For Dropbox, buying Tigris offers a faster route into a market that serves a different audience from the individuals and businesses that use its file-sharing software.
“Tigris brings together a product already running in production, an experienced team, and established relationships with AI developers,” Eric Webster, Dropbox’s chief business officer, told Crunchbase News via email. “That combination would accelerate our entry into infrastructure for AI applications through DBX Agent Cloud.”
A bigger bet amid a slower deal pace
Dropbox has made 35 known acquisitions, according to Crunchbase, with much of that activity taking place in its earlier years. Between 2012 and 2015, the company conducted 23 publicly reported acquisitions, including nine in 2014 alone. In contrast, it made four acquisitions across 2024 and 2025, averaging two per year, roughly 65% below its earlier pace.
Its recent purchases suggest a focus on AI-powered productivity, search and security. Dropbox acquired scheduling startupReclaim.ai and document security companyNira in 2024, followed byPromoted.ai andMobius Labs in 2025.
While the planned Tigris purchase would be its largest yet, Dropbox has made other sizable purchases over time. Its acquisitions of e-signature companyHelloSign in 2019, document-sharing platformDocSend in 2021 and business forms providerFormSwift in 2022 had purchase prices of $230 million, $165 million and $95 million, respectively.
Two paths into AI
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, the company is bringing AI directly to their Dropbox files to help them find, understand, create, edit and organize content, according to Webster. Customers can switch between supported AI models and work with their Dropbox files in tools like ChatGPT and Claude, with results returning to Dropbox.
For companies and developers, meanwhile, DBX Agent Cloud extends Dropbox’s storage capabilities to the infrastructure behind AI applications and agents.
“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.
Related Crunchbase query:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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