When we first invested in Daytona, we saw an exciting opportunity for a new infrastructure company that would bring cloud developer environments to the masses.

The initial thesis of the company was nearly right. There really was a compelling, even generational, opportunity to build a new infrastructure company for the inner loop of software development. But what we didn’t see at the time was that the largest source of demand for CDEs would come from a novel population of developers: AI agents.

This is what Daytona’s founders, Ivan, Vedran, and Goran, figured out at the end of 2024. They realized that agents would need their own computers and radically transitioned the company from serving people to serving agents.

One way of thinking about the market is that sandboxes are essential infrastructure for agents doing software development. For instance, an agent tasked with contributing to a software project might use a sandbox to edit files, run tests, and push new commits. This use case has exploded in the past year with the parallel rise of vibe coding platforms and autonomous coding agents. But while coding agents are massive consumers of sandbox compute, we think the demand for sandboxes extends far beyond traditional software development.

Sandboxes are computers for agents–as instrumental to agent work as laptops are to modern knowledge workers. The agent that designs circuit boards needs a sandbox. As does an AI scientist running simulations or an agentic financial analyst building a financial model.

It turns out that agents executing code to solve problems is a nearly universal and token efficient way for agents to reliably do their work. This is what sandboxes enable. And we believe Daytona is the best in the world at managing this kind of infrastructure.

Upfront is thrilled to double down in Daytona’s $24m Series A and welcome new partners FirstMark, Pace Capital, Datadog and Figma. It’s been an incredibly exciting two years working with Ivan, Vedran, Goran, and the rest of the Daytona team. They operate at a relentless pace with developer experience as the top priority; just look at the hum of activity on the Daytona Slack, X, etc. We couldn’t be more excited to see them continue to push the frontier of agent-native infrastructure.