Daytona runs sandboxes for AI agents, co-founder and chief executive Ivan Burazin told TNW. Its users include Meta, Cohere and Handshake, and the company has about 30 employees.
Burazin, a Croatian citizen, started Daytona with two co-founders, one of whom he has worked with for almost 20 years. Before Daytona, he co-founded Codeanywhere, a cloud development environment, and founded the Shift developer conference, which Infobip bought. Daytona started out automating developer environments for humans. Today it builds computers for AI agents.
He spoke to Cristian Dina at HumanX in Amsterdam on 24 September. It is the latest episode of the TNW Podcast, after Glean’s Arvind Jain, UiPath’s Michael Atalla and Zendesk’s Tom Eggemeier. The full conversation is in the video below.
School and work for agents
Burazin says Daytona helps agents “go to school and go to work.” School is post-training: AI labs and data companies run agents in Daytona’s sandboxes to train them. Work is serving companies whose agents act on behalf of people, often running long background tasks.
About 70% of revenue comes from post-training, he said. Most teams start on Kubernetes, which was built for deploying apps. Daytona is at least 36% faster for these jobs, Burazin said, which also frees up scarce GPUs for more of the time.
Daytona works on the CPU side, not the GPU side, and he thinks that is where the next shortage will hit.
“I strongly believe that there will be a CPU crunch and it’ll be bigger than the GPU crunch.” Ivan Burazin, Daytona chief executive
Windows and GPU sandboxes
Most sandboxes for AI agents are Linux machines with a CPU and no GPU, he said, and that is where Daytona started. Many enterprise applications only run on Windows, so it built a Windows sandbox. Burazin said Daytona was the first to do so and is the only provider offering one.
It then launched a GPU sandbox for agents that do 3D rendering or design work, not for training or inference. Companies now run AutoCAD and Blender in Daytona sandboxes, he said. The company shifts a little every day as customer demand changes, and that is what keeps the growth going.
Daytona has grown just shy of 51% month on month for 18 months, Burazin said, from the bottom up. It is self-serve and priced on consumption: customers sign up, add a credit card and call only when they need higher limits. It runs about 1,100 Slack channels with customers. It had just agreed to hire its first head of sales when Burazin spoke to TNW.
Events do most of the selling. Its own team runs dinners, hackathons and meetups across the US, Europe and Asia. Daytona also held a conference for 1,200 people on the basketball court at the Chase Center in San Francisco. Burazin’s X account, with about 20,000 followers, is the second growth channel, he said. A tweet with 2 million views last Christmas helped lead to a partnership with Nvidia to test its CPU.
Leaving Europe’s pace behind
The hardest moment was the pivot. The earlier product made a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year from Fortune 500 customers, and the founders went back to zero to rebuild. He hires mostly for grit, and for whether what drives a person matches what drives the company.
Burazin flies between San Francisco and Europe twice a month. Daytona has US and European entities. Two thirds of the team is in Europe today, but he expects most of it to be in the US next year. When he goes back to his part of Europe, he said, it feels about 10 years behind.
His advice to people starting out is to learn to handle risk and failure. He has worked since he was 12 and made money building websites in the 1990s. His first job, as a system administrator, paid about €600 a month.
“Everyone plateaus when they start to not take risk.” Ivan Burazin