Dropbox to buy Tigris Data for $350 million in its largest acquisition to date

Dropbox's biggest deal yet

Dropbox has agreed to buy Tigris Data, a cloud storage startup, for $350 million. According to TechCrunch, which reported the deal, the price appears to make this the largest acquisition in Dropbox's history. The purchase was announced Thursday and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, the company told TechCrunch by email.

Dropbox also said it has no plans to cut jobs as part of the transaction. That reassurance comes shortly after the company laid off 9% of its global workforce last month, a reduction reported by the Wall Street Journal and cited by TechCrunch.

What Tigris Data brings

Tigris Data was founded by engineers who previously built Uber's storage infrastructure. Its platform lets businesses keep data in multiple regions and automatically moves that data close to the people and machines requesting it, shortening retrieval times and improving performance. The startup raised a $25 million Series A round last year, according to TechCrunch.

DBX Agent Cloud

The acquisition is meant to underpin DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform Dropbox is building for businesses and developers working on AI models and agents. In its first phase, the platform will sell object storage as a standalone product, meaning customers can purchase storage on its own and use it with tools and applications already written for Amazon S3, Amazon's widely deployed object storage service.

Further additions are on the roadmap. Dropbox plans to extend the platform so AI systems can work with a broader range of content, including documents, images, audio and video, and to add filesystem features that would let AI agents manage files and carry context across tasks and sessions.

AI is also coming to the core product

Alongside the infrastructure play, Dropbox is weaving AI into its main app. Users will be able to instruct an AI to carry out supported tasks using their files, choose between different AI models, and connect their Dropbox content to third-party tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Muse.

TechCrunch reports that the updated experience has already reached more than 70,000 teams. For now it is available to eligible Standard and Advanced customers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, with broader availability planned for 2027.

Why it matters

The Tigris purchase is the clearest signal yet that Dropbox intends to position itself as infrastructure for AI workloads rather than only as a file-storage and syncing service. Making the new offering compatible with S3 from day one lowers the barrier to adoption, since a huge ecosystem of developer tools already targets that interface.

The deal is also not an isolated bet. Dropbox has previously bought AI-focused companies including Reclaim.ai, Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs. Spending $350 million, its largest sum to date, suggests the strategy is shifting from small tuck-ins toward a full platform play, wagering that the coming generation of AI agents will need somewhere to keep and manage their files.