Dropbox bets $350M on Tigris to sell AI developers S3-rival storage
What's the deal? Dropbox plans to acquire Tigris Data for $350 million, a startup founded in 2022 by former Uber engineers that offers S3-compatible object storage for AI applications. The move launches DBX Agent Cloud, a new service through which Dropbox will sell storage infrastructure to developers building AI apps.
What's the endgame? Dropbox wants to turn its storage expertise into a developer-facing business. Tigris lets developers keep data accessible across different cloud and compute environments, charging no egress fees — the transfer costs Amazon S3 users often pay when computing happens outside AWS.
Why now? AI workloads are generating growing volumes of images, video, training datasets, and model artefacts that need a consistent home as compute providers change. "The value of AI depends on the content and context it can work with," said co-chief executive officer Ashraf Alkarmi (translated from Russian).
What's the backstory? Dropbox is no stranger to building storage. Starting in 2015, it moved more than 90% of user data off Amazon's S3 onto an in-house system called Magic Pocket to cut costs and boost performance. But selling to outside customers is a different challenge.
"Operating infrastructure for Dropbox and offering a storage product to developers involve different requirements," chief business officer Eric Webster told The New Stack . "Tigris brings a working commercial product, an experienced team, developer relationships and early customer traction."
That traction includes Railway, Runpod, and Replicate — platforms spanning developer hosting, GPU infrastructure, and AI model deployment. Tigris raised a $25 million Series A in October 2025, backed by Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
What could go wrong? The deal still needs regulatory approval. And the announcement alone doesn't prove Dropbox can compete with established cloud platforms or specialist providers in commercial storage.
The signal: AI demand is making data infrastructure more valuable, drawing investment into adjacent storage businesses — Wasabi raised $70 million in equity in 2026 and expanded its AI-storage offerings. Dropbox's bet is that nearly two decades of running storage at scale can seed a new business just as AI workloads reshape where data lives.
Read more: thenewstack.io
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
