Daytona hits $1 billion valuation with $60 million raise

Daytona's raise comes as AI agents—software that can write and run code, browse the web or operate business software—increasingly need their own virtual machines to work safely and persistently. The startup was founded in 2023 by Burazin, Goran Draganić and Vedran Jukić to automate software development environments for large enterprises, but pivoted when the founders saw that agents would need computers too. Burazin told Fortune that the pivot meant giving away the company's existing customers and rebuilding everything, leaving about three months of revenue in the bank before relaunching.

The funding round drew an A-list roster of Silicon Valley founders, including Stripe's Patrick Collison, Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas, Quora's Adam D'Angelo and Zoom's Eric Yuan, alongside strategic investors Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures. Matt Turck, a partner at FirstMark, said in a statement that the firm believes the next infrastructure shift is from human-centric cloud primitives to agent-native ones—a bet reflected in the round's size and backers.

Burazin distinguishes Daytona from "neocloud" providers like CoreWeave and Nebius, which build GPU-heavy data centers for training and running AI models. He argues that running virtual machines requires traditional CPUs, and forecasts a coming CPU shortage as agentic workloads grow. He pointed to Meta's Muse agent, launched in September, which he said has "a computer underneath for every single chat," and estimated by his back-of-the-envelope math that Muse would need $2.8 billion worth of sandboxes to serve 100 million users.