Daytona raises $60 million at a $1 billion valuation to build sandboxes for AI agents

Daytona, a San Francisco startup that runs sandboxed computers for AI agents, has raised a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, Fortune reported in an exclusive on 20 October. FirstMark led. Fortune says it was joined by founders including Stripe’s Patrick Collison, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke, Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas, Quora’s Adam D’Angelo and Zoom’s Eric Yuan, plus Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures.

Daytona announced the round on its own blog the same day: led by FirstMark Growth, with Olivier Pomel of Datadog and Brendan Foody of Mercor among the angels, bringing its total funding to $91 million. CEO Ivan Burazin told Fortune that about $50 million of the round came from existing investors.

What Daytona sells

An agent that writes and runs code or drives software needs a computer. Daytona rents out isolated virtual machines, “sandboxes,” built for that, and says AI labs use them to let models practise tasks over and over in training and testing. Burazin told Fortune a new sandbox comes up in 60 milliseconds, because Daytona pre-distributes snapshots of configured machines to servers’ drives and resumes them on demand. Agents can also clone a running machine to try two approaches in parallel.

Daytona was founded in 2023 by Burazin, Goran Draganić and Vedran Jukić to automate developer environments. Burazin told Fortune that when they pivoted to agents they “basically gave our competitors all our customers” and relaunched with about three months of revenue left.

The claims, as claims

All of these come from the company, via Fortune:

• Growth. Revenue run rate up 25-fold between January and September. “We’ve been growing on average every single month 50.9%,” Burazin said. Daytona’s own post puts revenue growth since January at about 25 times, with average month-over-month net revenue retention of about 135%.
• Customers. Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition, Meta and Cohere. Daytona says Snorkel has provisioned more than one million sandboxes on its platform.
• The thesis. Burazin expects spending on CPUs, which sandboxes run on, to overtake spending on GPUs, and predicts “a CPU crunch.”

None of the customers is quoted in Fortune’s piece confirming the relationship.

Why it matters

Daytona is betting that agents need a cloud of their own, with CPU-heavy machines that start in milliseconds, not the 30 seconds to many minutes Fortune says a hyperscaler VM can take. Its own blog tested NVIDIA’s Vera CPU this month and reported 1,000 sandboxes online in 10.8 seconds, an in-house result. Investors are now pricing that bet at $1 billion.