Dropbox said on 5 November 2026 that it will buy Tigris Data, a company that runs globally distributed object storage for AI workloads, for about $350 million in cash. The agreement was signed on 3 November. It is the largest acquisition Dropbox has made since it was founded in 2007, and the company expects the sale to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to the usual conditions. Dropbox says it has no plans to cut headcount because of the deal. The company says it has more than 700 million registered users in about 180 countries, so the purchase puts AI-oriented infrastructure under a very large existing customer base.
The purchase comes with a new product, DBX Agent Cloud, a storage and data layer aimed at companies and developers who build AI apps and agents. It starts as plain S3-compatible object storage that a business can buy on its own. Dropbox plans to add a filesystem and tools for processing documents, images, audio and video later. Tigris describes its customers as depending on it to keep their applications running, and says their needs keep growing. Its pitch is that it charges no egress fees, meaning customers are not billed for moving data out, and that it keeps data physically close to the compute that needs it. Dropbox describes the layer as the place where an AI system finds the files and context it works from.
“The value of AI depends on the content and context it can work with.”
Ashraf Alkarmi, co-CEO of Dropbox, in Dropbox's announcement · sec.gov ↗
Dropbox also widened the AI features in its main product. Customers can ask it to carry out tasks on their files; it lays out a plan for approval first, stays within the user's permissions and keeps a log of what it did. People can swap AI models in the middle of a session and work on Dropbox files from ChatGPT, Claude and Muse. The feature has already reached more than 70,000 teams. For now it is open to eligible Standard and Advanced teams in the US, UK and Australia, in English only, with a wider rollout planned for 2027. The point, as Dropbox presents it, is that the assistant acts on a person's own documents and leaves a trail that can be checked afterwards.
Tigris was founded in November 2021 by former Uber engineers and is based in Sunnyvale, California. It has raised roughly $31.9 million, including a $25 million Series A in October 2025 led by Spark Capital with Andreessen Horowitz and Basis Set Ventures; General Catalyst backed it earlier. At the time of the Series A, Tariq told TechCrunch that the company had been growing eightfold a year since it started. Its chief executive, Ovais Tariq, has said Dropbox's scale will let Tigris take on larger workloads while it keeps its focus on developers. Dropbox co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi framed the aim as giving customers freedom to choose how they use AI while they keep control of their content.
Crunchbase News's illustration for its mergers and acquisitions coverage
Dom Guzman (illustration) · Image: Crunchbase News
Dropbox chief business officer Eric Webster told Crunchbase News that Tigris arrives with a product already in production, an experienced team and ties to AI developers, which shortens Dropbox's route into the market. He added that AI inside Dropbox is meant to raise engagement and retention, so the deal serves both the developer-facing storage business and the core file product that most of its customers use. The standalone storage offer also gives Dropbox something it can sell to developers who have no interest in its file-sharing app at all.
About Dropbox
Dropbox, a San Francisco company listed on Nasdaq as DBX, offers cloud storage, file synchronisation and sharing. MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded it in May 2007, with early backing from Y Combinator.
It listed on the Nasdaq in February 2018. Its history of buying companies runs through HelloSign in January 2019 for a reported $230 million, then its biggest deal, followed by DocSend in March 2021 and FormSwift in December 2022 for $95 million. In August 2024 it bought the AI scheduling tool Reclaim.ai, an early move into AI by acquisition. On 28 October 2026 it announced a cut of about 9% of its global workforce to line up spending with its top product and growth priorities, and said its chief technology officer, Ali Dasdan, would leave on 18 November.
The deal fits a pattern. Crunchbase counts 35 acquisitions by Dropbox, 23 of them between 2012 and 2015. Its biggest earlier purchases were HelloSign in 2019 for $230 million, DocSend in 2021 for $165 million and FormSwift in 2022 for $95 million. Recent AI-focused buys include Reclaim.ai and Nira in 2024, and Promoted.ai and Mobius Labs in 2025. The announcement follows Dropbox's cut of about 9% of its global workforce the month before, reported by the Wall Street Journal and set out in a filing dated 28 October. Dropbox disclosed the agreement in an SEC filing alongside its press release, and says the deal is subject to customary closing conditions, with the filesystem and content-processing features for DBX Agent Cloud due after that.