A Pakistani-origin entrepreneur is making headlines in Silicon Valley’s cloud infrastructure race. Ovais Tariq, former head of cloud engineering at Uber, has raised $25 million in Series A funding for his U.S.-based startup Tigris Data, positioning it as a direct challenger to tech giants such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, according to TechCrunch.
The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from notable investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) — one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital firms.
Disrupting the Traditional Cloud Model
Tigris Data is built around a bold thesis: the age of centralized cloud storage is over.
“Modern AI workloads 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.”
He argues that major cloud providers not only restrict flexibility but also penalize customers with high egress fees, commonly referred to as the “cloud tax.”
“Egress fees were just one symptom of a deeper problem — centralized storage that can’t keep up with a decentralized, high-speed AI ecosystem,” he said.
AI-Native Storage Engineered for Speed
Tigris was built by the same engineering team that designed Uber’s internal storage platform, making it one of the few startups with proven large-scale infrastructure DNA.
Key features of Tigris include:
- Automatic data routing to GPUs for faster AI training and inference
- Support for billions of files with minimal latency
- Distributed storage architecture optimized for real-time AI workloads
With 4,000+ customers — mostly AI startups developing models for audio, video, and image generation — Tigris is quickly becoming the storage backbone for next-gen applications.
“Imagine talking to an AI agent doing local audio,” said Tariq. “You want the lowest latency — compute and storage both need to be nearby.”
From Karachi to Silicon Valley
Born and raised in Karachi, Tariq studied computer science at the University of Karachi before beginning his career at a local IT firm. He later worked remotely for a Singapore-based database company before joining Uber’s headquarters in the U.S., where he eventually led cloud infrastructure.
He left Uber in 2021 — shortly after the company’s stock price fell to nearly half — to launch Tigris.
People close to Tariq describe him as a self-made founder with global ambition, someone who “always dreamed of building something that could rival the world’s best.”
The Road Ahead
Tigris currently operates three data centers in Virginia, Chicago, and San Jose and plans to expand into London, Frankfurt, and Singapore. According to Tariq, the company has been growing 8x annually since its inception in late 2021.
His journey — from Karachi’s early IT sector to leading a potential revolution in cloud infrastructure — underscores a powerful truth: when Pakistani talent is given the right ecosystem, it can compete on any global stage.
