The New York-based startup with Croatian roots, Daytona, providing an open source development environment manager, has announced a $5 million seed funding led by Upfront Ventures. The new funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of streamlined development environments to developers worldwide.

  • Daytona was founded in 2023 by ex-Chief Developer at Infobip Ivan Burazin, together with Goran Draganic, and Vedran Jukic, and develops an open source development environment manager. It aims to simplify the process of creating standard and secure environments, automates environment setups on branches, and shares environments seamlessly.
  • According to the startup, since launching its enterprise developer solution in late 2023, Daytona has nearly doubled its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Recently, the company released an open-source version forced on individual developers.
Image by Daytona:
CEO Ivan Burazin with Chief Architect Goran Draganic (left) and Vedran Jukic (CTO)

The funding round details:

This investment was led by Upfront Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that has been investing in the US and Europe since 1996, and is one of the largest and longest-standing firms in Southern California.

The round also included participation from the existing investor 500 Global which has doubled down on its investment in Daytona. With $2.7 billion in assets under management, 500 Global has funded over 35 billion-dollar companies, including GitLab, Twilio, Algolia, and many others.

Daytona’s vision of simplifying and democratizing development environments aligns perfectly with our investment philosophy. The most forward-thinking companies in the world have landed on cloud developer environments to achieve a uniform developer environment for their teams. The Daytona founders have been working towards this since their prior startup Codeanywhere. Their subject matter expertise and passion uniquely position them to build a beloved developer experience that also satisfies even the strongest security requirements,

Kevin Zhang, Partner at Upfront Ventures.

Additionally, the startup announced that Kevin Zhang, Partner at Upfront Ventures, joined its board. The startup also added that the new funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of its solution, and to hire new marketing, sales and engineering roles.