Dropbox plans to buy Tigris, the S3-compatible storage for AI teams

The company that keeps a developer's files in one place across clouds has just been bought. Dropbox said it plans to acquire Tigris Data. Tigris is an S3-compatible object storage service. AI teams use it to hold training data, model files and agent content. It runs outside a single cloud provider.

Tigris co-founder and CEO Ovais Tariq wrote about the deal on the Tigris blog. He said nothing about the product changes for existing customers. The team stays the same. The S3-compatible API stays the same. The pricing with zero egress fees stays the same. The support contacts stay the same. Tigris will keep running alongside whichever cloud a customer already uses. Former Uber engineers founded Tigris. It is based on a global object storage platform for AI workloads.

What Dropbox says the deal buys

Dropbox announced the planned acquisition on the same day. It is part of a wider push called DBX Agent Cloud. Dropbox says that effort starts with standalone object storage. Any company or developer can buy that storage on its own. Two more pieces come next. One is a filesystem interface on top of the storage. The other is content-processing tools. Those tools turn documents, images, audio and video into inputs an AI model can use. Tigris would be the storage layer inside that plan.

Ashraf Alkarmi, co-CEO of Dropbox, said the deal is about content. He said in the post that AI's value depends on the content it works with. Tariq said the pair want to keep the developer-focused product. He said Dropbox's scale will help meet storage demand. Neither company gave a price. Neither gave a closing date.

Dropbox also added AI to its own product

The same announcement rolled out a new Dropbox experience. It puts AI directly inside the file service. Dropbox says customers can prompt it to find and summarise files. They can draft documents from project context. They can edit PDFs and images. They can transcribe recordings. They can run several steps from one request. Dropbox says the new experience is already live. More than 70,000 teams use it on eligible Standard and Advanced plans. The rollout covers the US, the UK and Australia, in English. Wider rollout is planned for 2027.

Dropbox also said users can work on Dropbox files inside ChatGPT, Claude and Muse. No re-upload is needed. Results land back in Dropbox. Those claims come from Dropbox itself.

The buyer controls the roadmap now

A team picked Tigris to avoid lock-in to a single cloud. That team now has a new owner for its storage layer. In the short term nothing changes. The API, the pricing and the team are the same. Dropbox says Tigris will stay standalone. In the longer term the buyer controls the roadmap. The buyer also controls the pricing and the direction of the API. The new owner is a public company with different priorities from a storage startup.

The practical move is to keep the current setup running. Watch the changelog over the next three to six months. Keep a second storage layer ready to switch to. Watch for changes to pricing or the egress terms. The same test that makes Tigris useful today is swapping the endpoint of an S3 client. That same test makes a second option cheap to keep ready.

Source

Tigris Data: Dropbox plans to acquire Tigris. Also: Dropbox: Dropbox's next chapter.