Dropbox bets $350 million on Tigris Data to build AI storage

The deal, which appears to be the largest in Dropbox history, will help launch a new storage platform called DBX Agent Cloud Dropbox is spending approximately $350 million in cash to buy Tigris Data, a young cloud storage startup built for AI workloads. According to TechCrunch, the deal appears to be the largest acquisition Dropbox has ever made. Research on the transaction describes it as the company’s most significant purchase since its founding in 2007. What Dropbox is buying Tigris Data is based in Sunnyvale, California. Former Uber engineers founded it in November 2021. The startup runs a globally distributed object storage platform designed with AI use cases in mind. Object storage is the warehouse model of data storage: each file goes into a big bin with a label, rather than a nested folder tree. Tigris is also S3-compatible. That means software already written to work with Amazon’s widely used S3 storage interface can plug into Tigris without a rewrite. Tigris lets customers store and access data across multiple cloud environments without getting locked into one vendor or paying egress fees. Egress fees are the charges some cloud providers levy when you move your data out. ...