The development process can be thought of as a continuous loop of writing, running and testing code. The loop only works if developers have access to machines that can reliably run the software they’re building. It’s simple enough in theory, but in practice, establishing a uniform computing environment for teams of developers can be challenging. Even with containers, developers still struggle to quickly set up and maintain working development environments. Everything from missing or invalid environment variables to inconsistent database states to 3rd party integrations can break your development environment. Tack on multiple projects per developer and many developers per organization, the problem quickly grows out of hand and significantly taxes developers and internal platform teams.

This has all contributed to some of the leading tech companies in the world (e.g. Meta, Github, Shopify among others) adopting cloud development environments (CDEs). The advantage of pushing development environments to the cloud is the guarantee of a uniform computing environment. There’s no “but it works on my machine” problem if everyone is using the same commodity infrastructure that’s been configured in the same way.

Daytona makes it easy for any company to adopt CDEs. With Daytona, developers can spin up an environment in the cloud while still using their favorite Integrated Development Environment, IDE, (e.g. VS Code or JetBrains) on their local machine. Crucially, because Daytona is open source, companies can host their development environments in any deployment context: public cloud, private cloud, or on-prem.

The founders of Daytona, Ivan, Vedran and Goran, have a unique history in this space. They were previously the founders of Codeanywhere over 10 years ago, one of the first browser-based IDEs. Beyond our enthusiasm for the underlying thesis and timing of their business, we were inspired by the founders’ genuine passion and dedication to this problem. We’re thrilled to support them and lead their $5M Seed round.

At Upfront, we love to invest in companies that lower the activation energy needed for the adoption of an important business practice. We believe that to be the case with Daytona and CDEs. We have every confidence that Ivan, Vedran and the rest of the Daytona team are on their way to making CDEs common practice for the world’s developer teams. To learn more please visit their github page, join their Slack community and browse open roles. For more color on the founders’ journey, the trials and tribulations of starting and growing an open-source community, and fundraising in this environment, please check out our interview with Ivan and Vedran below.