Direct answer: Daytona, a startup building cloud infrastructure specifically for AI agents, announced on Tuesday that it has raised a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation — making the 2023-founded company a unicorn. FirstMark led the round, joined by the founders of Stripe, Shopify, Perplexity, Quora and Zoom, and customers already include Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Cursor, Meta and Cohere.
What happened
The round was reported as a Fortune exclusive on 20 October 2026 and confirmed by funding trackers. FirstMark — which also led Daytona’s $24 million Series A — led the $60 million Series B. About $50 million of the round came from existing investors, according to CEO Ivan Burazin, and the raise brings Daytona’s total funding to roughly $91 million. FirstMark’s Matt Turck joined the board at the Series A.
The cap table is the story-within-the-story: Stripe’s Patrick Collison, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke, Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas, Quora’s Adam D’Angelo and Zoom’s Eric Yuan all wrote cheques, alongside strategic investors Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures. When the people building the biggest agentic products personally invest in the infrastructure, it’s a strong signal about where they think the bottleneck is.
Daytona’s pitch is simple, and one analysis put it well: every autonomous agent — one that writes code, browses the web, operates business software — needs a computer to act on, isolated from the user’s laptop and from sensitive data. Traditional clouds can spin those environments up in 30 seconds to several minutes. Daytona claims 60 milliseconds, by keeping pre-configured machine snapshots on physical drives and attaching compute and memory on demand. The company says its customers already include Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Cursor, Cognition, Meta, Cohere, Mercor, Handshake, Surge AI, SambaNova, Postman, Bolt.new, n8n and Clay.
The money goes toward expanding the agent cloud beyond its initial sandbox product, scaling compute infrastructure, and hiring across San Francisco, Croatia and Singapore.
What it means for UK small businesses
You will never buy Daytona directly — but you will buy what it enables. A cheaper, faster “computer for agents” is what makes the next wave of AI agent products affordable for small businesses: customer-service agents, bookkeeping agents, lead-follow-up agents that actually do work in real software rather than just chatting.
Two things worth doing now. First, the infrastructure maturing this fast means the agent products built on it will arrive quicker than most small businesses expect — the small-business case for AI agents we wrote earlier is getting more relevant, not less. Second, start with agents that solve one painful workflow — automating lead follow-up is the classic first win — rather than waiting for a perfect all-in-one platform. The winners of the Daytona era will be the businesses that learned to delegate to agents early, not the ones that watched the infrastructure rounds from the sidelines.
Honest limits / what to watch
A $1 billion valuation on $91 million raised is a bet on a future, not a report card on the present. Daytona’s customer list is impressive, but it’s dominated by AI labs and agent builders — proof the infrastructure is wanted, not proof the agent products running on it are reliable enough for your business yet. Agents that “operate business software” still fail in messy, real-world ways, and a 60-millisecond sandbox doesn’t fix a wrong decision made at full speed.
Also watch the competitive picture: the big clouds aren’t standing still, and “every agent needs a computer” is an idea AWS, Google and Microsoft can copy. Daytona’s edge is focus and speed; whether that’s a durable moat or a feature the giants absorb is the open question. For a small business, the takeaway is patience with a bias to action: experiment with agents, but don’t rebuild your operations around any single agent platform yet.
FAQs
What is Daytona?
Daytona is a San Francisco startup building an “agent cloud” — secure, isolated virtual machines (sandboxes) where autonomous AI agents can run code, use tools and complete work. It was founded in 2023 and is led by CEO Ivan Burazin.
What is an “agentic cloud”?
Infrastructure built specifically for AI agents rather than human users: isolated sandboxes that spin up in milliseconds, so agents that write code, browse the web or operate business software have a safe computer to act on.
How much did Daytona raise?
Daytona announced on 20 October 2026 that it raised a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by FirstMark. That brings its total funding to about $91 million.
Who invested in Daytona?
FirstMark led the round, with an A-list of founder-investors including Stripe’s Patrick Collison, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke, Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas, Quora’s Adam D’Angelo and Zoom’s Eric Yuan, plus strategic investors Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures.
What does this mean for small businesses?
Cheaper, faster agent infrastructure means more affordable AI agent products for small businesses over time — but the winners will be businesses that start experimenting with agents now, not the infrastructure players themselves.
