Today's pick
Daytona
Cloud sandboxes that let AI agents run code, branch, pause and resume without losing state, built for workloads today's stateless cloud was never designed to hold.
- Problem
- 8
- Traction
- 8
- Founders
- 7
- Market
- 8
- Novelty
- 6
Why today
Today's pick is Daytona, the AI agent sandbox company confirmed on October 20, 2026 to have raised a 60 million dollar Series B led by FirstMark at a 1 billion dollar valuation. The same day produced Blackwall's 100 million dollar Series C that pushed the Estonian bot-mitigation unicorn to a 2.2 billion dollar valuation weeks after joining the country's unicorn club, Vessla's 3.3 million dollar oversubscribed pre-seed to bring AI agents to property management, Linkener's 7.5 million euro round to expand its Spanish energy management platform, and Coherence Quantum's 2.78 million euro seed for cryogenic quantum-computer control hardware. Daytona stands out because it sits directly on the infrastructure layer the AI agent boom depends on: its revenue run rate rose twenty-five fold between January and September 2026, and its customer list already includes Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition and Meta, even as it faces well-capitalized rivals like Modal, which raised 750 million dollars of its own just eleven days earlier.
Problem
Modern cloud infrastructure was built for stateless, short-lived production workloads, not for AI agents that need to run code, call tools and act autonomously for minutes or hours at a stretch. Agents need environments that start in milliseconds, persist state across failures, branch into parallel attempts, and can be paused, forked and resumed without losing progress, none of which fits how traditional virtual machines or containers were designed to behave. As agentic products move from demos to production, companies building them have had to improvise sandboxing on infrastructure that assumes requests are quick, independent and disposable, leaving a gap that is now drawing serious venture capital.
Product
Daytona provides programmable cloud sandboxes that developers launch through a single API, giving AI agents isolated environments to execute code and use software tools across Linux, Windows and macOS. Agents can pause and resume work, fork a sandbox to try several approaches at once, and snapshot state so nothing is lost between runs. Built on Docker containers with pre-warmed images rather than per-session microVMs, Daytona claims sub-90-millisecond cold starts, and has since added GPU-backed sandboxes so agents can run compute-heavy inference or training tasks inside the same persistent, stateful workspace.
Traction
Daytona's revenue run rate climbed twenty-five fold between January and September 2026, growth the company credits to agentic workloads moving from prototypes into production. Its customers and partners span frontier labs and infrastructure vendors alike, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition, Meta, Cohere, Mercor and Surge AI, while Snorkel and Trajectory use the platform specifically for AI training and evaluation workloads. The company reached a 1 billion dollar valuation with this round, up from an unstated mark at its February 2026 Series A, a rapid re-rating that mirrors the broader rush of capital into AI agent infrastructure this year.
Team
Daytona was founded in 2023 by chief executive Ivan Burazin, chief technology officer Vedran Jukić and chief architect Goran Draganić, who previously built the developer-environment startup Codeanywhere together. The company originally set out to standardize cloud development environments, sunsetting that product in February 2025 to relaunch two months later as a sandbox platform purpose-built for AI agents, a pivot that preceded its funding momentum. Daytona is headquartered in New York, with most of its roughly twenty-person team working from offices in Split and Zagreb, Croatia, and plans to hire further in San Francisco and Singapore.
Funding
Daytona's Series B, confirmed October 20, 2026, was led by FirstMark and drew a notably operator-heavy investor base: individual backers include Stripe's Patrick Collison, Quora's Adam D'Angelo, Mercor's Brendan Foody, Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Datadog's Olivier Pomel, Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas and Zoom's Eric Yuan, alongside firms Alumni Ventures, Evergreen Fund, Okta Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Torch Capital. Existing backers Pace Capital, Upfront Ventures and E2VC doubled, tripled and quadrupled their stakes respectively. It follows a 24 million dollar Series A in February 2026, also led by FirstMark, bringing Daytona's total funding to 91 million dollars.
Competitors
Daytona competes most directly with E2B, which isolates each sandbox in a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, versus Daytona's shared-kernel Docker containers optimized for persistent, stateful sessions. Modal is the other major rival, differentiated by native GPU support inside its sandboxes and backed by its own 750 million dollar Series D disclosed just eleven days before Daytona's round. Smaller challengers Vercel Sandbox, Runloop and Blaxel round out a crowded field, meaning Daytona's edge will have to come from speed, statefulness and the breadth of frontier-lab customers it has already signed rather than being first to market.
VC lens
Would YC fund it? Yes, since infrastructure that agent-building companies actually depend on is a classic picks-and-shovels bet, though the crowded, well-funded sandbox field means later-stage investors are now paying unicorn prices for what remains an unsettled architecture fight.
Biggest risk: Daytona's container-based approach competes against better-capitalized rivals, including Modal's fresh 750 million dollar war chest and E2B's microVM isolation model, in a category where switching costs are low and GPU-backed, security-isolated sandboxes could become table stakes; if Daytona cannot convert its twenty-five-fold revenue growth into durable multi-year contracts with the frontier labs it has signed, its 1 billion dollar valuation will be hard to defend.
Runners-up
Blackwall
An Estonian web traffic management and bot-mitigation platform that raised a 100 million dollar Series C led by AVP, reaching a 2.2 billion dollar valuation weeks after joining Estonia's unicorn club. (Oct 20)
Vessla
A Stockholm startup building AI agents for property operations that exited stealth with a 3.3 million dollar pre-seed round led by Seedcamp, more than twice oversubscribed. (Oct 19)
Linkener
A Spanish intelligent energy management platform serving over 2,000 customers that raised a 7.5 million euro round led by Alantra's Klima Energy Transition Fund. (Oct 19)
Coherence Quantum
A Finnish quantum-computing startup building cryogenic signalling and control hardware spun out of Aalto University that raised a 2.78 million euro seed led by Lifeline Ventures. (Oct 20)
Archive
40 reports · click a row to open it| Date | Winner | One-liner | Runners-up | Open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | Daytona | 60 million dollar Series B at a 1 billion dollar valuation led by FirstMark, as the AI agent sandbox company's revenue run rate rose twenty-five fold in nine months on a customer list including Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition and Meta | Blackwall, Vessla, Linkener, Coherence Quantum | |
| 2026-10-20 | Tenstorrent | 1.5 billion dollar round at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its 2024 mark, as chip architect Jim Keller's inference-chip startup turns down Intel and Qualcomm buyout interest to keep challenging Nvidia independently | Town, Hunar.AI, Rabot Energy, Otter Health | |
| 2026-10-19 | Modal Labs | 750 million dollar Series D led by Accel at a 15.75 billion dollar valuation, as the AI infrastructure startup says its annualized run rate crossed 1 billion dollars with usage tripling in five months, built on serverless GPU access for inference, training and agent sandboxes | OMass Therapeutics, Scanntech, North.cloud, Fortem Technologies | |
| 2026-10-18 | Mueon | 65 million dollar Series A led by Maverick Silicon, as the Portland semiconductor startup founded by two Intel veterans scales Cubelets, modular 3D blocks bundling compute, memory, power and cooling to cut AI data center power and density limits, already in use by AI chip startup d-Matrix | Estuary Biotherapeutics, Fission, Otter Health, HyLight | |
| 2026-10-17 | Chariot Claims | 10 million dollar Series A led by Silverton Partners, as the rebranded ClaimClam legal-tech platform scales automated matching of consumers to mass arbitration and class-action claims over hidden fees and hard-to-cancel subscriptions, building on more than 65,000 claims already processed toward an estimated 92 million dollars in settlements | Marklo, Siena, Rein Security, Peppermint | |
| 2026-10-16 | Salience Labs | 125 million dollar oversubscribed Series B led by Bullhound Capital, as the Oxford-spun-out photonics company wins new backing from AMD Ventures and Intel Capital for all-optical circuit switches meant to break the power and latency ceiling facing electronic switches as AI GPU clusters scale toward tens of thousands of chips | Navra, Type One Energy, Oratomic, Gallatin AI | |
| 2026-10-15 | Soufflé Therapeutics | 135 million dollar Series B led by Juvia Group, as the MIT bioengineer Robert Langer-founded biotech works to deliver RNA medicines to muscle and heart tissue, a problem that has stalled the entire siRNA drug class, backed by more than 3.5 billion dollars in big pharma partnerships before any program has reached the clinic | ICON, Pluto Security, Nous Research, Atomic Machines | |
| 2026-10-14 | Vitalize | 31 million dollar Series A led by Oak HC and FT, as the Y Combinator-backed startup unifying hospital staffing, scheduling, patient flow and capacity management expands after enterprise customers reported cutting manual scheduling work and premium labor spend | Gallatin AI, byteXL, Desible.ai, Credfix | |
| 2026-10-13 | Universal Quantum | 100 million dollar Series A co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, a record raise for a UK quantum computing company, as the University of Sussex spinout races to prove its modular trapped-ion chiplet interconnect can out-scale newly public rivals Quantinuum and IonQ | Atlas Atomics, Type One Energy, Sabi, Catalyst | |
| 2026-10-12 | Manus | 500 million dollar funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, the general AI agent's first raise since China blocked Meta's 2 billion dollar bid for the company and barred its founders from leaving the country, as Manus pursues a reported 4 billion dollar valuation on roughly 125 million dollars of annualized revenue | Oratomic, Matchpoint Therapeutics, Oxide Computer, Stuut | |
| 2026-10-11 | Arena | 200 million dollar Series B co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures at a 3.1 billion dollar valuation, as the company behind the Chatbot Arena leaderboard nearly doubles its valuation in ten months on roughly 100 million dollars of annualized revenue from selling AI evaluation and alignment benchmarking to labs and enterprises, while Scale AI's new Seal Showdown contests its neutral-referee position | Gallatin AI, Rein Security, Rivercell, TeddyHoldings.AI | |
| 2026-10-10 | Multiply Labs | 75 million dollar Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks with new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures, as the decade-old biologics-manufacturing robotics company passes 100 million dollars raised on the strength of its first commercial sale, an up to 85 million dollar deal with Retro Biosciences, while competing against well-funded rivals Cellares and Ori Biotech to automate cell and gene therapy production | Zomint, Parakeet Health, OuterSignal, Efficient Computer | |
| 2026-10-09 | RougeTx | 58 million dollar Series A led by BioGeneration Ventures and Angelini Ventures with the European Investment Bank's Aurea facility and Kurma Partners also investing, as the Leiden University Medical Center spinout launches the first disease-modifying candidate for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, a bleeding disorder with no approved therapies, built on more than two decades of pericyte research | GMI Cloud, Varda Space Industries, doxx.net, Beyond Appliances | |
| 2026-10-08 | General Medicine | 120 million dollar Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz with Eli Lilly and Mercy Health joining, as the PillPack founders' online healthcare marketplace brings total funding to 152 million dollars less than three years after launch on hundreds of thousands of customers and an 80 Net Promoter Score | Noah, Nous Research, Buntar Aerospace, Monid | |
| 2026-10-07 | Vinci | 250 million dollar Series B at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora Innovation, as the Palo Alto physics foundation model startup jumps from a 46 million dollar seed and Series A disclosed last December to a tenfold valuation leap less than a year later, aiming its technology at chip design incumbents Cadence and Synopsys | Spiko, Hadrian, WhiteLab Genomics, Inbolt | |
| 2026-10-06 | Pandektes | 13.5 million euro Series A led by Munich's Alstin Capital, as the Copenhagen legal-research startup grows revenue sixfold and wins customers switching off LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck and Karnov with an API-first legal data platform | OneByZero, Fleuret AI, Laki Power, RobCo | |
| 2026-10-05 | PaleBlueDot AI | 200 million dollar Series C at a 3.2 billion dollar valuation led by ComputeCore, as the Palo Alto AI compute platform nearly triples its valuation in under nine months on more than 5 billion dollars of signed customer contracts | Simple Energy, Elio Mortgage, Menos AI, SedMed | |
| 2026-10-04 | Flow Engineering | 50 million dollar Series B at a 750 million dollar valuation co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management, as the AI-native systems-engineering platform for hardware teams grows to over 100 million requirements managed and adds General Motors, Anduril and Intuitive Machines as customers less than a year after its Series A | Miter, Kanu AI, Beltic, Satlyt | |
| 2026-10-03 | EliseAI | 350 million dollar round at a 4 billion dollar valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, as the housing and healthcare conversational AI company nearly doubles its valuation in thirteen months on 200 million dollars of ARR and five straight years of 100 percent revenue growth | Kahua, Breye Therapeutics, Amara, Kuro | |
| 2026-10-02 | Armadin | 255.5 million dollar Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, as Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia's agentic attacker-swarm security platform runs live attack campaigns for Fortune 500 and government customers seven months after stealth | Foundational, Seeds Fincap, Numeral, Chamelio | |
| 2026-10-01 | General Intuition | 220 million dollar Series B at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, nearly tripling in three months, as the AI foundation model startup trains action models on billions of gameplay clips from its own sister company Medal | Varda, Jeeves, Sand.ai, Arivihan | |
| 2026-09-30 | Tiny Health | Oversubscribed $33M Series B led by B Capital as the at-home microbiome testing company posts 1,624% three-year revenue growth and quadruples its practitioner-facing business | Modulate, erad, Baselayer, Ande | |
| 2026-09-29 | Instinct | $1B Series C led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10B valuation, a roughly 4x jump in five weeks, as its text-message AI agent passes 100,000 users with 10% daily compounding growth | SiMa.ai, Quartermaster, Outmarket AI, Humanos | |
| 2026-09-28 | Solcoa Industries | $75M seed ($45M equity led by Bain Capital Ventures plus $30M JPMorgan-anchored debt) to build a 500-tonne Nevada plant using a novel rare-earth metalmaking process, aimed at breaking China's 95% grip on metallization | Clastix, Prevision Medicine, Spiich, Barq | |
| 2026-09-27 | Ultraviolette | $85M Series E led by Yali Capital and TDK Ventures; Bengaluru performance EV motorcycle maker plans US entry by 2027 on 4-5x revenue growth | Micro1, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Dextr AI | |
| 2026-09-26 | Island | $400M Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4B valuation, more than doubling its 2024 valuation as the enterprise browser expands into governing AI agents | Cyera, Confido, Heidi Health, Firecrawl | |
| 2026-09-25 | Ema | $77M Series B led by Creaegis, more than quadrupling its valuation as every existing backer doubled down and Wipro scales its AI Employees to 240,000+ workers | Ando, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Nuvah | |
| 2026-09-24 | TEKEVER | $580M Series D led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford; Ukraine-proven AI surveillance drone maker hits $6.4B valuation on a new 400M pound UK Army contract | Enveda Biosciences, Basecamp Research, Numeral, Brahma AI | |
| 2026-09-23 | Verda | $189M oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital; profitable Nordic GPU cloud crosses $1B valuation on $165M ARR | Snorkel AI, Nexstrom, MacroCycle, Demoverse | |
| 2026-09-22 | BCI-Sonics | RMB 200M (~$30M) Pre-Series A led by HSG and Yunqi Capital; non-invasive ultrasound brain-computer interface racing China's invasive BCI leaders and OpenAI-backed Merge Labs | Spott, HighLife, CellPoint, Benford | |
| 2026-09-22 | Amber Electric | €49M Series E led by Morgan Stanley's 1GT; automates 50%+ of Australia's home batteries, expanding VPP software into Europe via E.ON | Corridor, Paymob, Unit1 Studio, Drivn | |
| 2026-09-18 | TypeSafe AI | $40M seed led by DCVC; "System One" model returns typed decisions for software, not chat — built by RLHF co-inventor Diogo Almeida | Space Epoch, Facilo, Treble Technologies, DheyaTech | |
| 2026-09-17 | Exein | $270M Series C at $1.7B valuation (30x in 2 yrs); kernel-level security layer for robots, drones and autonomous machines | Anew Labs, Delos Data, CADDi, AIUC | |
| 2026-09-16 | Euclyd | €200M+ Series A; Samsung-backed (investor + manufacturer) AI inference chip built to out-efficiency Nvidia, chaired by ex-ASML CEO | Profound, Flam, ENCOS, Nutshell Therapeutics | |
| 2026-09-15 | Fortaegis | $50M oversubscribed Series A; quantum-safe security rooted in silicon, chaired by Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan | Qupital, Tandem Health, Atomarine, UniqYou | |
| 2026-09-11 | Positron AI | $875M Series C at $5B valuation; memory-first inference chips challenging Nvidia's HBM lock-in | The Boring Company, Mach Industries, Rogo Technologies, Swish | |
| 2026-09-10 | Cognition AI | $2B+ Series E at $48B valuation; Devin autonomous coding agent nears $900M run-rate | DigitalPaani, Algomatic Dynamics, Limetax, Fundly.ai | |
| 2026-09-09 | Bluecore Energy | Floating nuclear reactor barges for ports; $50M seed just 2 months after stealth launch | QNu Labs, ARC Ride, Circolife, Hope Care | |
| 2026-09-08 | Pixxel | $100M Series C, India's largest spacetech round; building orbital AI data centers | Nua, Navana.ai, GalaxEye, Atoms (Kalanick) | |
| 2026-09-07 | Medulance | GPS-dispatched ambulance network raises ₹24 Cr Series A-2 | Comet, Mokobara, Kit (Speakeasy), XDOF |
Sources
- Tech.eu — Daytona hits $1B valuation with $60M Series B for AI agent cloud
- AlleyWatch — Daytona Raises $24M to Replace Cloud Infrastructure Built for Humans With One Built for Agents
- Tech.eu — Blackwall hits $2.2B valuation with $100M Series C just weeks after joining Estonia's unicorn club
- Tech.eu — Vessla exits stealth with $3.3M to bring AI agents to property management
- Tech.eu — Linkener secures €7.5M to expand its energy management platform
- Tech.eu — Coherence Quantum raises €2.78M to tackle quantum computer scaling challenges