Pakistani-Origin Founder Ovais Tariq Raises $25 Million to Take on Big Cloud

A Pakistani-origin entrepreneur is making waves in Silicon Valley’s cloud computing scene. Ovais Tariq, who once headed cloud infrastructure at Uber, has raised $25 million in Series A funding for his U.S.-based startup Tigris Data. Co-founded by Ovais Tariq, Himank Chaudhary (CTO), and Yevgeniy Firsov (Chief Architect), Tigris is a company aiming to disrupt “Big Cloud” players like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, TechCrunch reported. The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, according to TechCrunch. Speaking to TechCrunch, Tariq said modern AI workloads demand distributed computing — and that data storage should evolve to match it. “Modern AI workloads and AI infrastructure are choosing distributed computing instead of big cloud,” he said. “We want to provide the same option for storage, because without storage, compute is nothing.” Tigris was built by the same engineering team that created Uber’s internal storage platform. The startup’s AI-native data storage system allows information to move automatically to where GPUs are located, supports billions of small files, and ensures low-latency access for AI training and inference. Tariq believes the traditional cloud model, centralized and expensive, is outdated. He told TechCrunch that major cloud providers charge high “egress fees” when customers move data between platforms, something often called 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. Tigris now serves more than 4,000 customers, most of them AI startups building models for image, video, and voice generation. “Imagine talking to an AI agent doing local audio,” Tariq explained. “You want the lowest latency — compute and storage both need to be nearby.” Tigris currently operates three data centers in Virginia, Chicago, and San Jose, and plans to expand into London, Frankfurt, and Singapore. Tariq said the company has grown 8x annually since its founding in November 2021. People close to Tariq describe him as a self-made founder from humble beginnings who “always dreamed of building something global.” Tariq grew up in Karachi and studied computer science at the University of Karachi. Began his career as a software engineer in a local IT firm before working remotely for a Singapore-based database company. He later joined Uber’s head office in the U.S., where he led cloud infrastructure before leaving in 2021, shortly after Uber’s share price fell from $45 to nearly $20, to launch Tigris. His journey, from coding in Karachi’s IT sector to leading one of the most ambitious challenges to the world’s biggest cloud companies, reflects again the fact that when Pakistan’s rich talent is given the right ecosystem, innovation here can compete on any global stage.