Dropbox shells out $350M for Tigris Data in AI infrastructure grab

Dropbox is opening its wallet wide. The company announced Thursday it's buying cloud storage outfit Tigris Data for $350 million — a deal it calls its largest acquisition to date — and pointing the whole thing at AI. The purchase is meant to beef up Dropbox's AI infrastructure and feed DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform built for businesses and developers churning out AI models and agents.

Dropbox told TechCrunch by email that the deal should close in the fourth quarter of 2026. Executives also said there are no current plans to shrink headcount over the acquisition — a notable promise given the company let go of 9% of its global workforce last month, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

DBX Agent Cloud will start life as a standalone object storage product, so businesses can buy storage on its own and plug it into tools and apps already built for Amazon S3, the cloud service companies lean on to stash and retrieve huge data volumes. Dropbox plans to layer on more later: support for documents, images, audio and video, plus filesystem features that let AI agents organize files and keep continuity across tasks and sessions.

The core Dropbox app is getting an AI glow-up too. Users will be able to ask AI to handle supported tasks using their own files, switch between different AI models, and pipe Dropbox content into outside tools including ChatGPT, Claude and Muse. Dropbox says that updated experience has already landed with more than 70,000 teams, with the first rollout open to eligible Standard and Advanced customers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Broader availability is slated for 2027.

Tigris Data comes with pedigree. It was founded by former Uber engineers who helped build the ride-hailing giant's storage infrastructure, and its platform spreads data across regions — automatically parking it closer to the users and computing power that need it, which trims access times and boosts performance. The company raised a $25 million Series A round last year.

This isn't Dropbox's first AI shopping spree, even if it's the priciest. The company has already snapped up Reclaim.ai, Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs as it tries to stay relevant in a world where files increasingly get read by machines instead of people.