Dropbox acquires Tigris Data for $350 million and releases new AI productivity features

Dropbox Inc. is acquiring cloud storage startup Tigris Data Inc. for $350 million.

The company announced Today’s deal comes with a major update to its product portfolio. It introduced DBX Agent Cloud, a service that artificial intelligence agents can use to store their data. Dropbox is also adding new AI productivity features to its flagship file-sharing platform.

Tigris Data, based in Sunnyvale, California, offers an object storage service that runs across multiple public clouds. The company says it enables applications to read and write many times faster than competing offerings. Additionally, the service includes several features to optimize AI workloads.

AI agents often run in sandboxes that contain, among other resources, the data they need to carry out their work. Loading data into a sandbox can be a relatively time-consuming process that impacts agent performance. Tigris Data offers a feature called bucket forms that speeds up workflow. Additionally, agents are prevented from modifying information used by other workloads.

Tigris Data’s service monitors the locations from which agents access records. When a new location is detected, it moves a copy of the records to a nearby server to reduce latency. The service caches the most frequently used files on a high-speed storage infrastructure to further reduce access times.

Dropbox said Tigris Data will support its push into the AI ​​infrastructure market. In conjunction with the acquisition announcement, the company introduced its first entry in this product category, DBX Agent Cloud. Like Tigris Data’s service, it is an S3-compatible object storage offering optimized for AI agents.

Dropbox plans to add a file system feature later. Object storage is best suited for unstructured data sets, while file systems are used to store data sets organized into folders. Dropbox plans to release the technology along with “content processing capabilities.” The company says these features will make it easier for AI models to process the information stored in the DBX Agent Cloud.

The offering comes alongside a major overhaul of Dropbox’s flagship file-sharing platform. An advanced search bar allows users to search for images by entering a description of the file they are looking for. Additionally, Dropbox can now respond to questions about a file by generating a natural language summary. For example, an employee might request a summary of the changes colleagues made to an important folder over the past week.

Dropbox can not only handle questions about files, but also edit them. The company says that using the built-in AI models, users can change the format of a file, move it to a different folder, or combine it with other records in a PDF document. Several other actions are also supported. Users can mix and match actions in multi-step workflows.

The new AI productivity features are initially available to customers in the US, UK and Australia with Standard and Advanced subscriptions. Dropbox plans to expand access next year.

Picture: Dropbox