(Editor’s note: This post on Daytona is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because our highly skilled internationals are always chasing the next big opportunity in careers or investments.)
Croatian IT veterans Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukić and Goran Draganić are the founders of an extremely promising AI company Daytona, which recently closed a $24 million Series A investment round. Daytona CEO Burazin is also the founder of the popular Shift conference, which brings together Croatia’s global programming scene. He launched Daytona after leaving Infobip back in 2023.
Daytona provides the infrastructure for AI agents in order for them to perform dynamic tasks. The public tends to focus on chatbots such as ChatGPT, but there’s a battle for infrastructure going on in the background, Burazin said. Daytona solves this issue with something called “a sandbox system” – virtual computers that are configured in milliseconds according to whatever the agent’s requirements are. They only remain active for the task’s duration, so costs are significantly reduced, alongside better security.
Domagoj Puljizovic revealed for Croatia’s Business Diary how FirstMark Capital, headquartered in New York City, recognised Daytona’s potential and led the A round investment. This provides plenty of encouragement given the fact that FirstMark recognised the potential of Airbnb, Pinterest, Shopify, Discord and Riot Games very early on. The round was also supported by previous investors Upfront Ventures, 500 Global and e2vc.
Daytona joins big Croatian names like Verne, Gideon Brothers and more
Daytona has now joined the circle of just six companies with Croatian origins that have attracted such a large investment round. These are Verne/Project 3 Mobility, Gideon Brothers, ReversingLabs, Microblink and Infobip. Burazin said a large part of the fresh capital will be deployed to expand Daytona’s server capacities so the company can support the increasingly complex requirements of Agentic AI and ensure the flawless operation of sandbox environments.
“We’re expanding our team and our current focus is on finding excellent engineers. We’re also busy investing in strengthening our market presence so that Daytona becomes a ‘top-of-mind’ solution for every company dipping its toes into the AI transformation in a serious way,” Burazin added. Most of Daytona’s 20 employees operate from offices in Zagreb and Split, while the company’s headquarters are actually in New York. “We made a decision to open an office in San Francisco. The office currently has three people, but we’re actively looking for 10 more new people to be based there,” Burazin said.
The fastest growing cloud infrastructure company
Daytona’s primary focus shifted from developer tools to infrastructure for AI agents in 2025. This was clearly a great decision as growth has been rather remarkable.
The company reached $1 million in annualized revenue in a mere two months, making it the fastest-growing cloud infrastructure company in history, significantly faster than well-known cloud companies such as Cloudfare or AWS.
Daytona’s data reveals that the company achieved monthly revenue exceeding 86,000 dollars back in July 2025. The company now registers millions of their aforementioned sandboxes created every day, with its clients made up of startups and Fortune 500 companies. Corporations in banking, defense, aerospace and insurance are the primary “targets” for Daytona, seeing them compete with GitHub (which Microsoft acquired for 7.5 billion dollars back in 2018) and GitLab, which is currently valued at between 5 billion and 15 billion dollars.
Daytona’s system protects clients’ corporate code by storing it in the cloud instead of locally on the developers’ computers. Matt Turck, a partner at FirstMark and a new member of Daytona’s board of directors, and Kevin Zhang, a member of Daytona’s board and a partner in Upfront Ventures, commented on the investment:
“A fundamental tech shift is unfolding as we move away from an infrastructure tailored to humans to one tailored to AI agents. Daytona’s success lies in it having managed to enable every AI agent to have its own computer that boots up in just milliseconds. This is an absolutely crucial building block” Turck explained.
Burazin began his path way back in 2009 with the Codeanywhere app
“Daytona’s amazing pace and their focus on the developer user experience are very inspiring. We’re at the very start of the AI agent era and we can’t imagine a better or more focused team to build this infrastructure,” Zhang said. Daytona otherwise grew out of the Codeanywhere app that Burazin started in 2009. In March 2024, Daytona partnered with Czech-based JetBrains following a pre-seed investment of 2 million dollars. Just three months later, a 5 million dollar seed round led by Upfront Ventures took place.
Burazin is now firmly of the belief that it will take less than five years for the company to reach the much desired 1 billion dollar valuation.
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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.
