This distributed data storage startup wants to take on Big Cloud (techcrunch.com)

Tigris, founded by the team behind Uber’s storage platform, raised a $25M Series A led by Spark Capital to build a distributed, AI-native storage network that competes with AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. The startup operates localized data centers (currently in Virginia, Chicago and San Jose) and plans expansion to London, Frankfurt and Singapore. Tigris says its platform “moves with your compute,” automatically replicates data to where GPUs sit, supports billions of small files, and delivers low-latency access for training, inference and agentic workloads—removing the egress fees and centralized bottlenecks that raise costs and latency on big-cloud storage. This matters because modern AI workloads increasingly run on decentralized GPU-first providers and multi-cloud setups; centralized cloud storage was designed to keep data close to each provider’s compute, not to follow distributed compute. For generative AI firms handling large image, video and voice datasets, localized storage reduces latency, cuts cross-cloud transfer costs (the industry “cloud tax”), and helps meet regulatory and data-control requirements. With 4,000+ customers and rapid growth (8x year-over-year since 2021), Tigris aims to make storage as flexible and distributed as the new compute landscape—potentially reshaping economics and architecture for large-scale, latency-sensitive AI deployments.