Dropbox pays about US$350m for Tigris while its own revenue grows 0.5%

01What Dropbox is buying, in its own words

Tigris describes itself as “a globally distributed, S3-compatible object storage platform purpose-built for AI”, founded by former Uber engineers, that lets developers keep data across clouds “without vendor lock-in or egress fees”.³ Object storage keeps each file as an object with an address rather than in folders; it is how Amazon S3 stores data, and “S3-compatible” means software written for S3 works with it unchanged. Dropbox says the deal “will help accelerate Dropbox’s entry into the market for AI infrastructure”. The same day it launched DBX Agent Cloud, a storage business for companies building AI applications that starts with standalone S3-compatible object storage.³

Tigris is “small, but growing rapidly” and “not material to our total revenue in the trailing 12-month period”, with thousands of customers including the developer platform Railway and “a little bit over 20 employees”, the chief financial officer, Ross Tennenbaum, said on the call. He declined to give its size before closing. Dropbox expects storage freed by its own efficiency work to absorb Tigris’s customers and their growth in 2027: “we have capacity just kinda sitting there that we wanna go out and sell.” The guidance leaves Tigris out.⁵

02What a flat Dropbox looks like

Excluding FormSwift, a document business whose wind-down finished at the end of September, revenue grew 1.0%, and 0.2% in constant currency. Annual recurring revenue was US$2.555bn, up 0.8%. Paying users rose to 18.20 million from 18.07 million, while average revenue per paying user slipped to US$138.76 from US$139.07. The business is very profitable: a non-GAAP operating margin of 42.2% (27.5% on GAAP).¹ Dropbox guides to US$630–633m in October–December and expects 2027 revenue, without Tigris, to be “roughly flat”, it said on the call.⁵ On 28 October it said it would cut about 9% of its global workforce, at a cash cost of US$27–33m.⁴

03Where the cash has been going

In the nine months to September Dropbox bought back 31.6 million of its shares for US$839.0m, and its term loans rose to US$2.668bn from US$1.488bn at the end of 2025; net interest expense was US$51.2m in the quarter, against US$20.3m a year earlier.⁶ Net income fell to US$116.1m from US$123.8m, but with 225.1 million diluted shares against 265.1 million, earnings per share rose to US$0.52 from US$0.47.¹

Dropbox’s shares closed 3.1% lower at US$34.66 on 6 November, the day after the results.⁷ What to watch in February: the first figures for Tigris’s revenue, and guidance that includes it.⁵