(Editor’s note: Tbis post on Daytona is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are founders, investors and entrepreneurs.)
The words “Croatia” and “unicorn” don’t appear together often, but they’ve come together more times in recent years than anyone would have ever expected. Daytona has now joined the ranks of Rimac and Infobip, and some enormous tech and AI players are using their services.
Daytona, a startup founded two years ago by Croatian entrepreneurs Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukić, and Goran Draganić, has raised an impressive $60 million in a new investment round. This latest sum has seen the startup’s valuation hit that golden $1 billion mark, placing it among Croatia’s (still rare) “Unicorns”, startups valued to stand at at least $1 billion.
The company is now headquartered across the pond in San Francisco, with teams based in its homeland in the cities of Split and Zagreb. Until now only two other companies from Croatia, the well known Infobip and Rimac, had managed to reach the much desired unicorn status.
Prominent investors
This particular investment was led by FirstMark Capital, a fund that made early investments in the gigantic Airbnb, Pinterest, Riot Games, Shopify and Discord. FirstMark also led Daytona’s previous round, which was a $24 million Series A investment. A sum of approximately $50 million of the new round came from existing investors. Daytona has otherwise raised about $91 million to date, according to Fortune.
Other participants in the round include Patrick Collison (Stripe), Tobi Lütke (Shopify), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Adam D’Angelo (Quora), and Eric Yuan (Zoom). Additional investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next, and Okta Ventures.
From Nvidia to Meta, this Croatian startup’s clients are massive names
Daytona, founded in 2023, started out as a tool for setting up development environments for large companies. It didn’t take long for the founders to come to the realisation that AI agents would also require their own computing environments. As a result of that realisation, the startup quickly pivoted its product toward what are known as “sandboxes.” These are isolated virtual computing environments where agents can execute code and utilise various tools.
Burazin revealed to the media that Daytona can provision a brand new sandbox in a mere 60 milliseconds. Launching a virtual machine on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud services can take anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes, depending on the configuration implied.
“The inference cloud is where the agent does all of its thinking, while Daytona’s cloud is where the agent does its actual work,” Burazin saidi, adding that the company’s client include some giant and somewhat intimidating names, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition, and Cohere.
Daytona’s annualised revenue grew 25-fold between January and September according to Burazin, who noted that during that period, the startup saw an average monthly growth rate of 50.9 percent.
In the fast-paced world of tech we live in today, adaptability and being able to get ahead of the next big thing is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Daytona’s founders appear acutely aware of precisely that.
“We reposition our product to some degree or another every three months, from both a business and a technical perspective. We do that in order to ensure that what we’re offering genuinely aligns with what the market currently needs,” Burazin concluded.
Daytona has several open positions, which you can see here.
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Lauren Simmonds
Lauren Simmonds is the editor of Total Croatia News, the largest English language portal in Croatia. She lives in Zagreb, Croatia, and is a translator, content writer, interpreter and the co-author of "Croatia - A Survival Kit for Foreigners," which was published in 2022.
