Tigris Data just secured $25 million in Series A funding to expand its network of localized data storage centers, directly challenging the dominance of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Led by Spark Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, the round positions the startup to capitalize on AI companies' growing frustration with traditional cloud storage costs and latency issues.
Tigris Data is betting that the AI boom will force a fundamental rethink of how companies store their data. The startup, founded by the team that built Uber's storage platform, just closed a $25 million Series A round to expand its network of localized data centers - positioning itself as the distributed storage layer for an increasingly decentralized computing world.
The funding, led by Spark Capital with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, comes as AI companies grow frustrated with what CEO Ovais Tariq calls "Big Cloud" - the triumvirate of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure that dominates enterprise data storage.
"Modern AI workloads and AI infrastructure are choosing distributed computing instead of big cloud," Tariq told TechCrunch. "We want to provide the same option for storage, because without storage, compute is nothing."
The timing couldn't be better. While companies like CoreWeave, Together AI and Lambda Labs have attracted billions in funding by offering distributed GPU capacity, most AI companies still store their data with the traditional cloud giants. That creates a fundamental mismatch - distributed compute paired with centralized storage.
Tigris's AI-native platform promises to solve this by automatically replicating data to wherever GPUs are located, supporting billions of small files while maintaining low-latency access for training, inference, and what the industry now calls "agentic workloads." The company already operates three data centers in Virginia, Chicago and San Jose, with plans to expand to London, Frankfurt and Singapore.
The pain points Tigris addresses are real and expensive. Batuhan Taskaya, head of engineering at customer Fal.ai, says egress fees - the notorious "cloud tax" charged when companies want to move data between providers - once accounted for the majority of his company's cloud spending. Think of it like your gym charging extra fees just because you want to cancel your membership.
