Bulgarian Tiger Technology Secures €8.8M to Power Hybrid Cloud Data Infrastructure for Enterprise AI

Bulgarian Deep Tech Makes a €8.8M Statement in Hybrid Cloud Data Infrastructure

Bulgarian enterprise infrastructure startup Tiger Technology has closed a €8.8 million ($10 million) Series A funding round, marking one of the more significant European deep tech raises in the hybrid cloud data infrastructure space. The round was led by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, with participation from TDJ, Endeavor Catalyst, Impetus, and existing investors MFG Invest and Dimitar Ratchev. The capital will fuel international expansion across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, alongside continued product development and the growth of a sales and partner ecosystem.

For IT decision makers and data engineers who have been wrestling with the reality that enterprise data doesn't neatly live in one place, Tiger Technology's pitch is straightforward: you shouldn't have to choose between the cloud and your existing on-premises infrastructure. The company's flagship product, Tiger Bridge, creates a transparent data layer that allows organizations to move and access data across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments without disrupting workflows or forcing costly forklift upgrades.

Why 80% Unstructured Enterprise Data Is Now a Board-Level Problem

To understand why investors are backing Tiger Technology, it helps to understand the scale of the problem it is solving. According to the company's own data — consistent with findings from analysts including Gartner on enterprise cloud adoption patterns — more than 40% of enterprise data still resides on-premises, approximately 80% of that data is unstructured (think video files, documents, CAD drawings, archival media), and more than half qualifies as "dark data": files that are stored but never actually analyzed or used.

That last figure should be alarming for any organization that has invested in AI tooling. Machine learning pipelines and large language model fine-tuning workflows depend on accessible, well-labeled, high-quality data. If more than half your data is effectively invisible to your systems, your AI strategy has a structural problem before it even begins. This is the core market opportunity Tiger Technology is capitalizing on: not just cloud migration, but making data actually usable across wherever it happens to live.

The company estimates the global hybrid storage market will reach $29.3 billion by 2030, driven by enterprise AI adoption, ballooning volumes of unstructured data, and tightening requirements around security and data sovereignty. That last factor is particularly salient for European enterprises operating under GDPR and increasingly under the EU AI Act's data governance provisions. Being able to maintain data residency on-premises while still leveraging cloud-scale compute is not a nice-to-have for regulated industries — it is a compliance requirement.

Tiger Bridge: How the Platform Actually Works for IT Teams

For developers and IT architects evaluating hybrid storage solutions, the promise of "seamless data bridging" often dissolves on contact with reality. Latency issues, metadata loss, version conflicts, and vendor lock-in are endemic problems in the hybrid storage space. Tiger Technology's approach with Tiger Bridge is to operate as a transparent software layer — meaning existing applications, NAS systems, and file servers continue to function as normal, while the platform handles tiering, replication, and cloud migration invisibly in the background.

In practice, this means an organization running video archives in a media production environment, or managing engineering files across construction sites, doesn't need to retrain staff or rebuild workflows. Tiger Bridge integrates with existing Windows file server environments and common cloud storage backends, including Amazon S3 and compatible object storage. Rather than replacing infrastructure, it extends it — a positioning that resonates well with IT decision makers who are under pressure to modernize without introducing downtime risk.

The results from real deployments are compelling. Tiger Technology reports that recent customer projects have delivered up to a 10x improvement in file restore speeds during multi-petabyte cloud migrations, reduced on-premises storage requirements by up to 90%, and enabled organizations to surface years of historical data for AI analysis. The company currently manages more than 100 petabytes of enterprise data across sectors including transportation, media, construction, and government.

Data Sovereignty and GDPR: Why European Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Matters Now

The timing of this raise is not coincidental. European enterprises are navigating a complex convergence of regulatory pressure and AI ambition. GDPR has long mandated careful handling of personal data, including restrictions on where data can be processed and stored. The EU AI Act, which began phasing into effect, adds further governance requirements around training data and data quality for AI systems. Meanwhile, discussions around EU cloud sovereignty — including initiatives like Gaia-X, the European cloud infrastructure project — reflect a broader political and commercial push to reduce dependence on hyperscale US cloud providers for sensitive workloads.

This is precisely where Tiger Technology's hybrid model finds natural product-market fit. A manufacturer in Germany, a broadcaster in France, or a government contractor in the Middle East can use Tiger Bridge to keep sensitive or regulated data on-premises while pushing cold or archival data to cloud tiers — all while maintaining a single namespace view of their data estate. For privacy professionals and compliance officers, this is architecturally significant: it allows organizations to implement data residency controls at the storage layer, which is far more reliable than trying to enforce data locality through application-level policies.

The cybersecurity dimension also matters. With ransomware attacks increasingly targeting enterprise backup and archival systems, having data tiered across multiple environments — with immutable cloud copies as a backstop — provides meaningful resilience. IBM's annual Cost of a Data Breach Report has consistently found that hybrid cloud deployments, when properly configured, can reduce breach costs compared to purely public or purely on-premises environments. Tiger Technology's "always-on" framing speaks directly to this concern.

AWS Rising Star Recognition and the Path to Global Expansion

A notable validation of Tiger Technology's market traction came earlier this year when Amazon Web Services named the company a Rising Star Partner of 2025, recognizing its work in helping enterprises migrate and manage large-scale file infrastructures in hybrid cloud environments. AWS partner recognition is not purely ceremonial — it comes with co-selling opportunities, joint go-to-market resources, and placement in the AWS Marketplace, all of which meaningfully accelerate sales cycles for enterprise software companies.

The company plans to use the Series A capital to deepen integrations with major hyperscale cloud providers beyond AWS, as it expands its footprint across the US, Europe, and the Middle East. The partner ecosystem strategy is particularly important in enterprise infrastructure, where procurement decisions are often influenced by system integrators, resellers, and cloud consultancies rather than direct vendor relationships. Building a robust channel network — alongside direct enterprise sales — is the playbook for sustainable growth in this segment, as McKinsey's cloud migration research has highlighted in analyses of successful enterprise software scale-ups.

What Investors See at the Intersection of AI and Hybrid Cloud Storage

The investor syndicate behind this round is a telling signal about where sophisticated European venture capital sees durable enterprise value being created. 3TS Capital Partners, which advised the lead fund TCEE Fund IV, has a track record of backing Central and Eastern European technology companies with genuine global ambitions. Their thesis here is explicit.

Momchil Vassilev, Managing Director of Endeavor Bulgaria, echoed this sentiment, noting that Tiger Technology exemplifies the kind of globally ambitious deep tech company Endeavor supports — one that combines Eastern European engineering depth with credible international growth. This framing matters for the broader European tech narrative: Bulgaria,

Originally reported by The Recursive. Summarised and curated by European Purpose.