Daytona hit $3M ARR in 95 days. CEO Ivan Burazin explains how (10 Minutes or Less)
Series A startup Daytona had a real business: customers, revenue, enterprise interest.
Ivan Burazin walked away anyway.
He was going all in on agents.
I interviewed my friend Ivan, CEO of Daytona, on this week's podcast. Most podcasts are an hour or more. This one is 10 Minutes or Less.
Daytona builds sandboxes, basically composable computers for AI agents. When an agent writes code, installs packages, browses, tests, retries, or keeps state, it needs a machine to do that work in. Safe, fast, able to spin up on demand.
But Daytona did not start there.
The company arc:
In 2023, Ivan started the company as an on-prem product for human engineers. It had traction. It also had enterprise sales, a slog even in 2026.
On a call with one of the biggest banks, they ask how big the company is. Ivan says 15. The bank asks, "Five-zero?" Ivan says, "No, one-five." Conversation over.
At the same time, AI-agent companies were pulling Daytona somewhere else.
Ivan showed the new product around and felt real product-market fit for the first time. Every demo got the same reaction: "I need this right now."
They started handing out alpha API keys. The pull felt different from anything Ivan had experienced before.
Ivan decided to shut it down completely and sent those customers to competitors anyway.
Then the numbers went vertical: $1M ARR 50 days after launch, $3M ARR 45 days later, $24M Series A led by FirstMark's Matt Turck. The company keeps growing like mad.
That's the clean version.
The messier version is Ivan on planes between the US and Croatia, sleeping around five and a half hours, taking maybe two days total off since, and doing weekly IVs because you can't drink the equivalent of eight liters of water.
He went viral for tweeting that if you take a break these holidays, you're not gonna make it. His point was narrower than hustle theater: in this supercycle, every moment you're not working, you're ceding it to someone else.
Someone replied that they'd never heard of his company.
Ivan's answer: exactly. That's why I can't take a break.
Asked if it lets up anytime soon, he said: "I don't know the answer to that."
I found the candor refreshing. This is the level of speed many founders are choosing while the agent infrastructure market changes every day.