Dropbox is betting heavily on AI infrastructure. The company said Thursday it will acquire Tigris Data, a cloud storage company that supports AI workloads, for $350 million. The deal appears to be the largest acquisition Dropbox has made, and it arrives alongside a new service aimed at businesses and developers building AI applications and agents.
What is DBX Agent Cloud?
The service, called DBX Agent Cloud, is designed to provide infrastructure for AI workloads across multiple clouds. It launches with standalone object storage that works with tools built for Amazon S3, Amazon’s cloud storage service. That lets customers buy storage on its own and plug it into systems they already use.
Why is Dropbox buying Tigris Data?
The move marks a clear shift for a company best known for file storage and sharing. Dropbox wants to become part of the plumbing that supports AI applications, and Tigris gives it a faster route. Dropbox said the acquisition would help it expand into AI infrastructure more quickly, drawing on nearly two decades of experience running large-scale storage systems.
Tigris was founded by former Uber engineers. Its platform lets developers store and access data across different cloud providers rather than depending on a single vendor. The company also raised $25 million in a Series A funding round last year.
“Combining that experience with our product and close relationships with developers would help us support larger workloads,” said Ovais Tariq, Tigris co-founder and chief executive.
The deal comes about six months after Ashraf Alkarmi became Dropbox’s co-CEO. In a statement tied to the announcement, he framed the company’s strategy around data. “The value of AI depends on the content and context it can work with,” Alkarmi said.
Will Dropbox cut jobs after the Tigris deal?
Dropbox told TechCrunch by email that it currently has no plans to reduce headcount as part of the acquisition. The company cut 9 percent of its global workforce last month, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Dropbox is also reworking its core product around AI agents. Users can now describe a task in plain language. Dropbox then finds the relevant files, suggests a plan and carries out supported actions once the user approves it. Those actions include summarizing folders, comparing document versions, drafting files, editing PDFs and images, transcribing recordings and trimming video clips. The system can also organize folders, move or rename files and complete several steps through a single request.
Actions remain subject to existing file-sharing permissions. Dropbox keeps a record of changes and lets users undo supported operations. Customers can switch between AI models during a session. They can also work with Dropbox files in external tools, including ChatGPT, Claude and Muse, without uploading the files again. Finished work is saved back to Dropbox.
Dropbox says the new features have already reached more than 70,000 teams. The initial rollout covers eligible Standard and Advanced teams in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, and support is limited to English. The company plans to expand availability in 2027.
The company has more than 700 million registered users across roughly 180 countries. Its agent push also depends on what comes next for DBX Agent Cloud. Dropbox plans to add content processing, which converts documents, images, audio and video into formats AI systems can use. It also plans filesystem features that would give AI agents a persistent place to store and manage files between tasks.
The need for those features is clear from how AI tools are used today. Applications and agents draw on training data, model files and media spread across several cloud platforms. Dropbox wants to offer companies a portable home for that content, so they can switch providers as their requirements change.
Dropbox has made AI-focused acquisitions before. It previously bought Reclaim.ai, Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs. The Tigris purchase, however, is by far the largest of those moves.
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