Daytona archived the repo that made it

On 20 October 2026, Daytona announced a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by FirstMark Growth. Stripe's Patrick Collison, Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas, Zoom's Eric Yuan and a queue of other founder-investors joined; total funding is now $91 million. I went back to the GitHub repository that made the company's name and found a note where the development used to be: "As of June 2026, Daytona's core development has moved to a private codebase." The repo is archived. Seventy-one and a half thousand stars, and a README that reads like a farewell card.

What the company sells now is an agent execution cloud: sandboxes that start in under 200 milliseconds, pause with their state intact, fork into parallel copies and vanish when the job is done. One platform carries Linux, Windows, macOS and GPU machines. Billing is per second — a vCPU at $0.0504 an hour, memory at $0.0162 per GiB an hour, a preemptible RTX 4090 at $0.57 and an Nvidia B300 at $4.08 — with $200 of free compute and no card required to start. The pitch is that an agent's computer is not a server: nobody plans its jobs in advance, and it may need to fork itself a thousand times before lunch.

Revenue already did the convincing

The numbers in the announcement are unusually concrete for a funding post. Revenue has grown roughly 25× since January. Month-over-month net revenue retention averages about 135% — the company itself compares that to Snowflake's famous 160% a year at IPO. Writer ran its own sandbox fleet until it passed 20,000 sandboxes a day, then moved to Daytona and provisioned 300,000 in a month. AfterQuery replaced an in-house GKE cluster in a day. The customer list spans Meta, Cohere, Postman, Mintlify and bolt.new — and n8n, the Berlin workflow tool sitting in our own directory, which is a quietly satisfying detail.

Zagreb by biography, San Francisco by org chart

The about page tells the older story. The three founders — Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukić and Goran Draganić — pioneered Codeanywhere in 2009, one of the first cloud development platforms, out of Zagreb. Daytona was founded in 2023 on that experience, and the team page still reads like a Croatian engineering roster. The legal entity is Daytona Platforms Inc.; the copyright line at the bottom of the pricing page says the same.

After the Legora piece I wrote that I'd watch careers pages by city. I opened Daytona's on 30 October. The two leadership jobs that matter most for this product — Team Lead, GPU Sandboxes and Team Lead, Windows Sandboxes, plus the senior engineers under them — are listed for San Francisco only. Growth, product and design roles can be "SF or Croatia". The code went private in June; the engineering leadership is being hired an ocean away in October. That is not an accusation. It is a pattern this Journal has now seen twice in one week of looking.

The licence survived; the development didn't

To be fair to Daytona, the archived repository is a genuine gift: AGPL-3.0, free to use, fork and build on "as is and without support or warranty". A forkable sandbox platform with real traction behind it is more than most departing companies leave. But it is frozen at the exact moment the company stopped needing the community to find it. Open source was the go-to-market. The market arrived; the source stepped back.

Daytona is not in our directory, and this is not a verdict on whether it should be. It is a reminder of how to read the next agent-infrastructure pitch that arrives wearing an impressive star count. Check the commit dates, not the stars. Check where the entity is registered and where the team leads are being hired. The company worth evaluating is the one that exists today — private codebase, US corporation, metered GPUs — not the repository that got it invited to the round.