Analysis
Dropbox agreed to pay approximately $350 million in cash for Tigris Data, an AI-focused object storage startup, in a deal the company told Crunchbase News is its largest acquisition since its 2007 founding. Dropbox disclosed the definitive agreement, entered November 3, 2026, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
What Tigris and Dropbox do
Tigris, founded in November 2021 by Ovais Tariq and a team that previously built Uber's internal storage platform, runs a network of localized data storage centers designed to meet the distributed-compute needs of AI workloads, an alternative to routing everything through a single hyperscaler region. The company says it has grown 8x every year since founding and now counts more than 4,000 customers, including AI-infrastructure company Fal.
Dropbox, best known for consumer and business file sync-and-share, reported $2.521 billion in total revenue for its most recent fiscal year, down 1.1%, as its core storage business matures. Chief business officer Eric Webster said Tigris brings "a product already running in production, an experienced team" to Dropbox's push beyond file storage. Pulse tracks deals like this one in its funding tracker.
“The company says it has grown 8x every year since founding and now counts more than 4,000 customers, including AI-infrastructure company Fal.”
Tigris's funding history
Tigris raised about $31.9 million in total since its 2021 founding, per Crunchbase data.
Its only disclosed priced round came in October 2025: a $25 million Series A led by Spark Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures also participating, and General Catalyst listed as an earlier backer.
Against that backdrop, Dropbox's $350 million purchase price values Tigris at more than 10 times its total funding to date, one of the larger return multiples in enterprise infrastructure M&A this year.
Who invested in Tigris
- Spark Capital -- led Tigris's $25M Series A (October 2025).
- Andreessen Horowitz, Basis Set Ventures -- participated in the Series A.
- General Catalyst -- an earlier backer, round undisclosed.
AI infrastructure market and competitors
Dropbox is entering a market dominated by AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, alongside AI-native distributed-compute players like CoreWeave, Together AI and Lambda Labs, all of which have raised far more capital than Tigris to build out GPU and storage infrastructure. Dropbox's bet is that its existing enterprise relationships and the new DBX Agent Cloud product, unveiled alongside the deal, can win AI-infrastructure customers that would otherwise default to a hyperscaler.
For existing Dropbox customers, the company says it's adding AI search and editing features and support for models like ChatGPT and Claude directly inside Dropbox files, a separate and smaller bet than the Tigris acquisition.
What the headline misses
Per Crunchbase data, Dropbox has made just four acquisitions across 2024 and 2025 combined, roughly 65% below the pace it set between 2012 and 2015, so "biggest acquisition since 2007" is a function of a recently slow dealmaking pace as much as deal size. Dropbox's largest prior deals, HelloSign in 2019 and DocSend in 2021, were both well below $350M. Whether Tigris's AI-infrastructure customers stay once integrated into a 2007-era consumer storage brand remains an open question the deal doesn't answer.
What to watch next
The companies have not disclosed integration timelines, whether Tigris's team, including CEO Ovais Tariq, stays on, or how DBX Agent Cloud will be priced against AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage. Dropbox's next quarterly earnings call is the first checkpoint for whether the AI-infrastructure push actually moves its revenue line.