Daytona just crossed $100M in run rate. Four quarters ago it was at $1M.
Better than Anthropic and Cursor.
37.5x growth this year alone
a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation, led by FirstMark, with Patrick Collison (Stripe), Tobi Lütke (Shopify) and Eric Yuan (Zoom) as angels
35 people and, until a few weeks ago, zero salespeople
What they do? An AI model thinks on a GPU. When an agent has to do real work (run code, open a browser, install a package, fill a spreadsheet) it needs a computer. Daytona gives every agent its own computer through an API: it starts in milliseconds, keeps its state, forks into copies and disappears when the job is done.
→ Daytona gets paid for every second an agent spends working.
📚 In this newsletter, I break down the moves that took Daytona from a dead product, a failed Series A and a few months of runway to $100M in four quarters.
Inside you will find:
How to Spot a Market Before Anyone Believes in It
The pivot from developer environments to agents, and the customers who called the first version useless.How to Survive When All Your First Customers Die
Why their first customers were Lovable clones and why the first act has to be a home run.How to Win Attention With Zero Salespeople
Invite-only drink-ups, the "cool kids" trick and a launch plan borrowed from the music industry.How to Grow 37.5x in a Year by Tilting the Same Product
The Christmas discovery that turned RL labs into 60% of revenue, and a roadmap that stops at six weeks.How to Sell Infrastructure Through 1,500 Slack Channels
Every employee in every customer channel, docs as the product and a slot in every lab's sandbox list.How to Raise After Your Series A Fails
The term sheet they refused, the same deck with a line breaking off the slide and cold emails as short as a tweet.The Team Behind Daytona
Codeanywhere, a conference business they sold, the Croatia discount and a family move to San Francisco.The Road to $100M
The rounds, the customers, the retention numbers and the CPU crunch Ivan sees coming next.
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