Dropbox has agreed to acquire Tigris Data, a Sunnyvale, California, startup that runs a globally distributed object storage service designed for AI workloads. Dropbox signed the definitive agreement on November 3, 2026, and announced the deal two days later, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Dropbox will pay approximately $350 million in cash for all of Tigris's outstanding equity, subject to customary purchase price adjustments, the filing said. The company expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, once customary closing conditions are met or waived. Dropbox told Crunchbase News it would be its largest acquisition since the company was founded in 2007.
Tigris will form the core of DBX Agent Cloud, a storage and data offering that Dropbox launched alongside the deal. Dropbox told TechCrunch it has no current plans to cut headcount as a result of the acquisition.
What Tigris built
Tigris sells object storage that works with the Amazon S3 interface, so software already written for S3 can usually switch to it without large code changes. The service places data automatically near the users and computing resources that read it most often, which the company says lowers access times without customers having to manage replication or caching themselves.
When it raised its Series A in October 2025, SiliconANGLE reported that the service was tuned for small files such as the embeddings used in AI systems, and that it used caching based on a log-structured merge-tree. Tigris offered four storage tiers, from standard to two archive classes, and a feature called shadow buckets that copies a workload's most-used records over time instead of moving a whole dataset at once.
At that point Tigris had more than 4,000 customers and data centers in Virginia, Chicago and San Jose, with plans to add London, Frankfurt and Singapore, according to SiliconANGLE, which cited TechCrunch. Neither company disclosed Tigris's headcount, revenue or current customer list.
“Our customers depend on Tigris to keep their applications running, and their needs keep growing.”
Why Dropbox is buying
Dropbox has spent most of its history selling file storage and sharing to people and teams. With DBX Agent Cloud it is trying to sell infrastructure to a different buyer: companies and developers building AI applications and agents. Crunchbase News reported that Dropbox called the deal and the related announcements a significant shift in its AI strategy.
The first DBX Agent Cloud product is standalone S3-compatible object storage, sold on its own and designed to run alongside the clouds, compute and developer tools customers already use. Dropbox plans to add support for processing documents, images, audio and video, and filesystem features that let AI agents manage files and keep track of work across tasks and sessions, TechCrunch reported.
Eric Webster, Dropbox's chief business officer, told Crunchbase News that Tigris brings a product already in production, an experienced team and existing relationships with AI developers, which should speed Dropbox's entry into the market. Buying a working service is faster than building one for an audience Dropbox does not traditionally serve.
The deal was announced together with new AI features in the main Dropbox product. Users can describe a goal and have Dropbox find relevant files, propose a plan and carry out supported actions after approval, such as summarizing folders, comparing versions or transcribing recordings. Dropbox said the experience has reached more than 70,000 teams, with an initial rollout to eligible Standard and Advanced teams in the U.S., U.K. and Australia and wider availability planned for 2027.
The founders and the funding
Tigris was founded in November 2021 by former Uber engineers who had built the ride-hailing company's storage platform. Its co-founder and chief executive is Ovais Tariq. At the time of the Series A, Tariq told TechCrunch the company had grown eight times every year since its founding.
The startup raised a $25 million Series A in October 2025, led by Spark Capital with Andreessen Horowitz, a returning investor, and Basis Set Ventures taking part, Crunchbase News reported. Basis Set Ventures had led the seed round, and General Catalyst was another early backer. Crunchbase data puts Tigris's total funding at about $31.9 million, which means the sale price is roughly 11 times the capital it raised.
A return to bigger deals for Dropbox
Crunchbase counts 35 known acquisitions by Dropbox, most of them in its early years: 23 between 2012 and 2015, including nine in 2014 alone. The pace slowed to four deals across 2024 and 2025, including Reclaim.ai, a scheduling tool, and the document security company Nira in 2024, and Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs in 2025.
At about $350 million, Tigris costs more than any of Dropbox's earlier purchases with reported prices, including HelloSign for $230 million in 2019, DocSend for $165 million in 2021 and FormSwift for $95 million in 2022, according to Crunchbase News.
The deal follows a cut to Dropbox's workforce. TechCrunch, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that Dropbox laid off 9% of its global staff the month before, though the linked Journal report gave a figure of about 6%. Dropbox cautioned in its announcement that the Tigris deal may not close on the expected timeline or at all.
