San Francisco, CA – Tigris Data, a startup specializing in AI-native storage solutions, has announced the close of a $25 million Series A funding round. The investment, led by Spark Capital with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, is earmarked for the expansion of Tigris's network of localized data storage centers, designed to meet the demands of distributed AI workloads.
The funding addresses a growing market dynamic where the proliferation of AI companies has intensified the need for distributed computing power. While entities like CoreWeave and Together AI provide distributed compute capacity, many organizations continue to store data with major cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. These traditional storage systems were developed to keep data proximate to their own compute resources, often presenting challenges for multi-cloud or geographically dispersed AI operations.
Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data, stated, \"Modern AI workloads and AI infrastructure are choosing distributed computing instead of big cloud. We want to provide the same option for storage, because without storage, compute is nothing.\" He noted that traditional cloud providers' centralized storage can result in egress fees and latency issues, which he described as symptoms of a system struggling to keep pace with a decentralized, high-speed AI ecosystem. Batuhan Taskaya, head of engineering at Fal.ai, a Tigris customer, reported that egress fees once constituted a significant portion of Fal's cloud expenditure.
Tigris's platform is engineered to move data with compute, automatically replicating information to where GPUs are located. It supports billions of small files and aims to provide low-latency access essential for training, inference, and agentic AI workloads. The company reports over 4,000 customers, primarily generative AI startups that manage large, latency-sensitive datasets for image, video, and voice models.
Beyond performance and cost efficiencies, the demand for localized data storage is also influenced by requirements in highly regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, where data security is paramount. Additionally, increasing corporate emphasis on data ownership, exemplified by recent actions from companies like Salesforce regarding data access for AI rivals, is contributing to the shift.
Founded in November 2021 by a team previously involved in developing Uber’s storage platform, Tigris Data has established three data centers in Virginia, Chicago, and San Jose. Tariq reported that the startup has achieved 8x annual growth since its inception. The newly secured capital will facilitate further expansion in the U.S. and into international markets, including London, Frankfurt, and Singapore, to support anticipated demand.
