Daytona Hits $1B Valuation as Croatia's Third Unicorn
By @sharedot · · 6 pages
- Startups
- Venture Capital
- AI Agents
- Croatia
- Funding
Daytona raised a $60M Series B led by FirstMark at a $1B valuation, becoming Croatia's third unicorn after Infobip and Rimac.
What happened: $60M Series B, $1B valuation
Daytona, a Croatian-American startup founded in 2023 by Ivan Burazin, Goran Draganić and Vedran Jukić, announced a $60 million Series B on October 20, 2026 at a reported $1 billion valuation.
Fortune reported that FirstMark led the round, and TechCrunch followed with the same lead investor plus a long angel list.
The Recursive framed the raise as $60 million (€56 million) and counted Daytona as Croatia's third unicorn, after communications software firm Infobip and EV maker Rimac Automobili. Daytona's own announcement said it will build its platform into the Agent Cloud.
Why it's surprising: 35 people, $1B, 25x revenue
A $1 billion valuation attached to a 35-person team is rare, and Burazin himself said the headcount on October 20, 2026, adding that the company is hiring across the board.
FirstMark, which also led Daytona's $24 million Series A in February, per NewsCord, had a partner declare that the next infrastructure shift is from human-centric cloud primitives to agent-native ones.
A three-year-old company pivoting to agent infrastructure in 2025 and reaching unicorn status within a year is the upset in the numbers.
The evidence: what the sandboxes actually do
Daytona sells sandbox infrastructure for AI agents — isolated computers where generated code can install packages, run tests, use Git and fail safely.
StartupCafe reports the platform supports Linux, Windows, macOS and GPU environments, and Daytona's site advertises sub-90ms sandbox creation and $200 in free compute.
Founder Burazin argued in the funding announcement that agents don't work like the long-lived services today's cloud was designed for, instead spinning up thousands of short, stateful jobs. angel backers named across coverage include Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke, Aravind Srinivas, Eric Yuan and Olivier Pomel, with Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures also participating, per Daytona's round list reported by TechCrunVh and NewsCord.
The stakes: numbers that don't match, hiring ahead
The funding totals disagree across coverage: shattered.io notes StartupCafe puts total funding at $91 million while The Recursive reports about €85 million, a gap the outlets attribute to mixed currencies and definitions.
Both sources agree on the $60 million Series B and the reported $1 billion valuation, though the valuation remains a press-reported figure rather than an audited one. Daytona said it plans to expand its go-to-market sales team and hire engineers.
For Croatia, the third unicorn spans a third distinct industry, suggesting the talent pipeline isn't tied to one specialty. For the developer-tools market, the round signals investors are funding the layer beneath many agents rather than betting on any single model winning.