Exclusive: Daytona, a startup building the ‘agentic cloud,’ valued at $1 billion in latest funding round

Daytona has hit unicorn status by arguing that AI agents need their own kind of cloud. The San Francisco startup said Tuesday it raised a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, with FirstMark leading the round. Big names piled in too: Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke, Aravind Srinivas, Adam D’Angelo and Eric Yuan, along with Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures. Burazin said about $50 million came from existing investors, and Daytona says it has now raised about $91 million in total.

The company’s bet is simple: if an AI agent is writing code, browsing the web or using business software, it needs a machine to work on. That machine can be a virtual one in the cloud, and Daytona argues that kind of sandbox is safer than giving an agent broad access to a normal system. The startup says that setup keeps the agent from wandering off into places it should not go, or from being hijacked and tricked into spilling sensitive data.

Daytona was founded in 2023 to automate software development environments for large enterprises. Then the founders saw the agent opportunity, and Burazin says they tore up the old plan, rebuilt the product and relaunched with only about three months of revenue left in the bank. The company now says it serves a long list of AI names, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition, Meta and Cohere. Snorkel, which helps customers test and benchmark AI models, has reportedly provisioned more than one million sandboxes on Daytona’s platform.

Burazin says revenue run rate grew 25-fold between January and September, with average monthly growth of 50.9%. He also says Daytona can spin up a sandbox in 60 milliseconds, compared with the 30 seconds to many minutes he says can be involved with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. That speed matters if companies end up deploying thousands of agents, each needing different tools on the fly. The company plans to spend most of the new money on sales hires, with some going to engineers.