Dropbox to buy Tigris for $350 million to enter AI infrastructure market

Dropbox is moving beyond file sharing into selling the storage behind AI applications. On November 5, it announced plans to acquire Tigris for $350 million to accelerate DBX Agent Cloud. Dropbox told Crunchbase News the proposed transaction would be its largest acquisition since its founding in 2007, bringing a developer-focused business into a new infrastructure push.

A storage business built for developers

The proposed purchase targets a different audience from Dropbox’s file-sharing customers: developers whose applications run across multiple cloud providers. Tigris, founded in 2021 by former Uber engineers and based in Sunnyvale, California, is building a network of localized data-storage centers. It says that network can meet the distributed computing needs of modern AI workloads.

Dropbox describes the underlying need as keeping AI content available while the systems using it change. Training datasets, model artifacts and material such as images and video need to work across clouds and computing providers. Agents also need persistent access to files as they move between tasks and sessions, according to the company.

For Dropbox, the acquisition is a way to enter that business faster rather than assemble every part itself. Chief business officer Eric Webster told Crunchbase News that Tigris’s existing product, team and developer relationships would accelerate the company’s entry into infrastructure for AI applications through DBX Agent Cloud.

Tigris brings together a product already running in production, an experienced team, and established relationships with AI developers.

Eric Webster, Dropbox chief business officer, in an email to Crunchbase News

A larger deal, with a standalone offering

The $350 million price would put Tigris above Dropbox’s previous sizable purchases. It paid $230 million for e-signature company HelloSign in 2019, $165 million for document-sharing platform DocSend in 2021 and $95 million for business-forms provider FormSwift in 2022. The Tigris transaction remains a planned acquisition, not a completed purchase.

In its announcement, Dropbox described DBX Agent Cloud as a storage and data layer that starts with standalone object storage. That means a service for storing and retrieving large collections of data, including images, video and files used to train and run AI models. Companies and developers can buy that storage independently.

The offering is S3-compatible, meaning developers can use familiar tools and supported applications built for Amazon S3. Dropbox says the service is designed to sit alongside the clouds, computing providers and developer platforms customers already use. Its stated role is to give application content a consistent home wherever those applications run.

Files and content processing come next

Tigris co-founder and CEO Ovais Tariq framed the proposed combination around complementary experience. In Dropbox’s announcement, he pointed to Dropbox’s nearly two decades of operating storage at scale and Tigris’s developer-focused product. He also argued that customers should have the flexibility to run their computing wherever it serves them best.

Beyond the initial storage offering, Dropbox identified two additions it plans to make next. They address different parts of an AI application’s work: keeping files available over time and preparing content for models to use.

• Filesystem capabilities would give applications and agents a persistent place to manage files and continue work across sessions.
• Content processing would turn documents, images, audio and video into useful inputs for AI. Both capabilities remain planned additions, rather than features presented as part of the initial object-storage offering.