Croatia has its third unicorn, and part of its story is being written in Split. Daytona, the startup led by Ivan Burazin, has closed a $60 million Series B round. The company is now valued at $1 billion. That makes Daytona Croatia’s third unicorn, after Infobip and Rimac.

Who invested in Daytona?

The round was once again led by New York-based FirstMark, which also led Daytona’s $24 million Series A in February. Around $50 million came from existing investors. Strategic investors Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures also took part.

The angel investors include leaders of some of the best-known tech companies: Patrick Collison (Stripe), Tobi Lütke (Shopify), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Adam D’Angelo (Quora) and Eric Yuan (Zoom).

With this round, Daytona has raised around $91 million in total. It all started in 2023 with a first investment of $2 million.

Computers for AI agents

Daytona builds so-called sandboxes. These are isolated virtual computers where AI agents can run code, use tools and complete tasks. At the same time, they don’t get unrestricted access to a company’s systems.

According to the company, a new environment spins up in 60 milliseconds. Virtual machines at the big cloud providers take anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes.

Burazin explains the difference simply: models think on GPUs, while agents work on CPUs. Daytona is building exactly that “working” layer of the infrastructure.

The company started out with a tool for automatically setting up development environments. As generative AI took off, it shifted its focus to infrastructure for AI agents.

OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia among Daytona’s customers

Daytona is used by some of the biggest names in AI, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia and Meta. Cursor, Cognition and Cohere are also among its customers.

The company’s revenue is not public. According to Burazin, it has grown by an average of 50.9% per month. Its revenue run rate grew 25-fold between January and September.

The money goes into infrastructure and hiring

Most of the money will go into infrastructure, meaning renting and buying servers for data centres. A smaller part goes into hiring. The company has offices in Split, Zagreb and San Francisco. Burazin told Dnevnik.hr that Daytona currently has 35 employees and expects 50 to 60 by the end of the year.

A team that also builds from Split

Daytona was founded in 2023 by Ivan Burazin (CEO), Vedran Jukić (CTO) and Goran Draganić (Chief Architect). Their collaboration goes back to 2009 and the Codeanywhere project.

The local community also knows Burazin as the founder of the Shift conference, which Infobip acquired in 2021. He was also a speaker at the Split Tech City Festival, and Vedran Jukić spoke at our DEV Night. And at the SaaStanak meetup we co-organised at the Center of Excellence of Split-Dalmatia County, Toma Puljak from Daytona spoke to a full room about what AI actually looks like in real production environments.

We’re happy about every success that’s good for our city and our country, and this one is special because part of the Daytona team works right here in Split. Congratulations to Ivan, Vedran, Goran and the whole Daytona team!