TechCrunch: Ivan Burazin's Daytona Lands FirstMark Growth Round for an Agent Cloud

Daytona Platforms has raised a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by FirstMark Growth. The round brings the company's total funding to $91 million, according to the startup and TechCrunch, which covered the deal on Friday, 23 October.

The three year old company, which TechCrunch describes as New York based, is building what founder and chief executive Ivan Burazin calls the Agent Cloud: computing infrastructure designed specifically for AI agents rather than for people or traditional software.

An unusually crowded cap table

The angel list is what made headlines. Daytona says the round includes Stripe's Patrick Collison, Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas, Zoom's Eric Yuan, Datadog's Olivier Pomel, Quora's Adam D'Angelo and Mercor's Brendan Foody. Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures joined as strategic investors.

Existing backers came back too. In his announcement post, Burazin thanked E2VC, now in its fourth round with the company, Upfront Ventures in its third, and FirstMark Capital and Pace Capital in their second. Tech.eu reported that Pace doubled its investment, Upfront tripled its commitment and E2VC quadrupled its own. New investors also include Evergreen Fund, Alumni Ventures and Torch Capital.

FirstMark also led Daytona's $24 million Series A in February, TechCrunch noted, which means the firm has now priced two rounds in the same calendar year.

The thesis: agents need their own computers

Burazin's pitch starts from a simple claim. "Agents don't work like the long-lived services today's cloud was designed for," he wrote. "They spin up thousands of short, stateful jobs nobody planned in advance, and they need a cloud built for that."

In practice, Daytona sells sandboxes: isolated computing environments where an agent can run code, use Git, open a browser and carry out tasks without touching anything else. A traditional cloud instance takes minutes to boot and runs until it is shut down. Burazin says an agent's computer has to start in milliseconds, pause with its state intact, fork into parallel copies and disappear when the job is done.

The company says it is the only provider offering Linux, Windows, macOS and GPU sandboxes on one platform. Tech.eu reported that customers launch these environments through a single API.

Matt Turck, a partner at FirstMark, framed the bet as an infrastructure shift "from human-centric cloud primitives to agent-native ones" in a statement published with the announcement.

The numbers behind the valuation

Daytona has shared some unusually specific growth metrics. Since January, the company says, revenue has grown about 25 times, and average month over month net revenue retention has been about 135 percent. Put plainly, Burazin wrote, customers from six months ago are spending nearly three times as much with Daytona today in aggregate.

Those are company figures, not audited results, and Daytona has not disclosed absolute revenue. But they explain why investors were willing to pay a unicorn price for a company that is only three years old.

The customer list spans the agent economy. Daytona names model builders such as Meta and Cohere, training data and evaluation companies including Handshake, Snorkel, Surge AI and Turing, and product companies such as Writer, Clay, n8n, Postman and bolt.new. Tech.eu reported that Daytona also provides infrastructure to Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Cursor and Cognition.

One example from the announcement shows the build versus buy decision many teams now face. Writer ran its own sandbox platform until it passed 20,000 sandboxes a day and keeping it running became a full time job. On Daytona, the company says, Writer provisioned 300,000 sandboxes in a single month.

Lessons for founders

Three things stand out for anyone building a startup today.

Hold a contrarian view early. Burazin says the company has argued from the start that agents are digital workers who need a computer, a view he admits was contrarian when people asked why agents could not just run on existing infrastructure.

Let customers prove the market. Daytona's story is told through retention and usage data rather than vision alone. Expansion inside existing accounts is often more persuasive to investors than new logos.

Use angels for signal. A cap table filled with operators who run payment, commerce, search and video companies tells the market that builders see the problem firsthand.

What the money is for

Daytona plans to expand its platform beyond its first sandbox product, scale its computing capacity and grow its team, Tech.eu reported, with hiring planned across San Francisco, Croatia and Singapore. Burazin's post says the company is hiring on site in San Francisco across engineering, go to market and operations.

"Companies are going to manage thousands of digital employees, and each one needs a safe place to fail," Burazin told Tech.eu. Whether agent specific clouds become a lasting category or a feature of the big cloud providers is the question this round is betting on.