Daytona Hits $1B Valuation, Becoming Croatia's Third Unicorn

Croatian-American startup Daytona has closed a $60M (€85M) Series B round that values the company at $1B, making it Croatia's third unicorn. The round brings Daytona's total raised to date to roughly €85M. The company is building infrastructure for what it expects will be an incoming wave of AI agents.

By Nathan Brooks

Daytona's new status matters beyond bragging rights. Croatia now counts three unicorns, and Daytona sits squarely on the AI-infrastructure thesis that dominates European venture right now. If AI agents need compute sandboxes and environments to run in, Daytona wants to be the rails underneath them.

What else moved in CEE this week?

Aikido Security, the Belgian cybersecurity firm that itself became a unicorn earlier this year, acquired Cyberly, a Warsaw-based startup that trains employees to recognise AI-powered attacks. The financial terms were not disclosed. All four Cyberly co-founders are staying on to build the platform, and Warsaw will become one of Aikido's development hubs. The company plans to gradually grow the team in Poland — a vote of confidence in Polish engineering talent, not just an acqui-hire.

Mika Games, the Cyprus-based gaming investment company founded by Wargaming co-founder Nick Katselapov, raised $10M (€8.92M). The round was led by Flint Capital, with participation from several new and existing investors. The thesis is narrow and specific: helping mobile game studios bridge the gap between soft launch and large-scale paid marketing — the stage where many titles stall or die.

FRESH 32, a Slovenian oral-care startup, raised €1.2M led by AYMO Ventures. The company replaces nylon toothbrush bristles with flexible TPU and will use the capital to scale production and enter the UK market. Participating investors include Tivoli Partners, Business Angels of Slovenia and SMOK Angels CEE. It's a rare CEE win for a physical consumer product in a region fixated on AI and SaaS.

Zowie takes its AI agents to Romania

Zowie, a Polish company that puts AI agents for customer service into production for telecoms, insurers, banks, logistics firms and retailers, is expanding beyond its home CEE market, starting with Romania. The new office and future CEE expansion are funded from company revenue plus prior rounds totalling $20M (€18M) from backers including Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), Tiger Global, Alt Capital (Jack and Sam Altman) and Inovo, among others. That's a bootstrapped-style expansion — no new raise announced.

Europe bets €22M on 6G

At the EU level, the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) — a public-private partnership spanning European industry, telecom operators, research organisations, universities and SMEs — has awarded €22M in grant funding across five selected proposals: 6G-AID, HEMES-6G, EUNICON-6G, EU-INDIA-6G-BRIDGE and SNS IMPACT.

The money is earmarked for:

• data foundations for AI-powered networks;
• an 8-site EU testing platform for large-scale experimentation;
• strategic EU-India cooperation on next-generation networks;
• a coordinated European roadmap for 6G connected devices beyond smartphones.

What does this week change for operators?

For founders, the signal is mixed but legible. AI infrastructure and AI security continue to absorb the largest cheques — Daytona at $1B and Aikido's acquisition both confirm that. But FRESH 32's €1.2M shows hardware-adjacent consumer plays can still raise in CEE if the product story is sharp. And with €22M flowing into 6G research, telecom-adjacent startups across the region should watch the SNS JU pipeline closely — the next wave of EU network funding is already taking shape.