Dropbox spent its first decade teaching people to store files. Its biggest purchase yet is aimed at the machines that now generate them. The company plans to buy Tigris Data for $350M, the largest deal in its 19-year history.
Tigris, based in Sunnyvale and founded by former Uber engineers, runs a network of localised storage points built for applications spread across several clouds. It has raised roughly $31.9M, including a $25M Series A in October 2025 led by Spark Capital with Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures.
From file cabinet to infrastructure
The acquisition arrives alongside DBX Agent Cloud, a new line that launches with object storage for images, video and model training data. Dropbox describes the shift as moving beyond sharing into selling the plumbing AI builders rent.
Buying gets there faster than building. Eric Webster, Dropbox’s chief business officer, points to a product already in production, a team that knows AI developers and existing relationships as the reason for the deal.
The deal is also a change of tempo. Crunchbase counts 35 known Dropbox acquisitions, but 23 of them landed between 2012 and 2015, including nine in 2014 alone. Recent years averaged about two annually, focused on productivity, search and security.
Price context
HelloSign cost $230M in 2019, DocSend $165M in 2021 and FormSwift $95M in 2022, so Tigris is a step up in size rather than category.
The competitive question is whether a storage brand carries weight with developers who pick infrastructure on latency, pricing and cloud neutrality. Dropbox’s answer is that Tigris already has the neutral, multi-cloud position it would have needed years to build.
Existing customers get a parallel pitch: AI that works inside their files, switching between models and returning results to the same folder.
