Daytona raised $60M Series B led by FirstMark, hitting a $1B valuation. The signal: once companies start running thousands of AI agents at once, the basic unit of cloud computing stops being a 'virtual machine for a person' and becomes a 'sandbox spun up in 60 milliseconds and thrown away.'
The cloud landscape post (order 7) of the Sandbox Series. Summarizes positioning, pricing, cold start, isolation strength, and applicable scenarios for E2B, Daytona, Runloop, Vercel, Cloudflare, Modal, AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Alibaba OpenSandbox, Azure Container Apps — with a selection decision matrix.
Daytona treats a sandbox as a long-lived computer that can start, pause, snapshot, and fork. It raised a $24 million Series A in 2026, while a Laude Institute case study reports 37,000 sandboxes in one week. It fits parallel evaluations and coding agents, but its core open-source repository is no longer maintained.
Hermes can run commands on seven backends: local, ssh, docker, singularity, modal, daytona, and vercel_sandbox. The decisive trade-off isn't performance, it's approval — local and ssh run dangerous-command checks, the other five skip them entirely because the container is treated as the boundary. Also, Docker defaults to one long-lived container shared across sessions, not a fresh environment per conversation.