How Daytona backed its $24M Series A with Verbatim’s social proof engine

Challenge

Converting category‑defining customer wins into GTM-ready social proof‍

Just a year after its launch, Daytona became one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies, giving teams a secure runtime platform to deploy production‑ready AI agents. Scaling at that pace raised the bar for credibility just as fast, making customer trust essential to unlocking Daytona’s next stage of growth.

With that in mind, Co‑Founder and CEO Ivan Burazin made social proof a core GTM priority. He needed bespoke, high-impact case studies and videos to showcase the real-world outcomes that Daytona’s flagship customers like LangChain, Turing, and Writer were achieving. These assets would arm sales with credible proof points and shorten evaluation cycles for frontier AI infrastructure buyers.

As Daytona prepared to launch its Series A, customer stories would also serve as powerful fundraising assets. Ivan knew investors would request live references as they scrutinized customer sentiment, retention, and product-market fit. Sharing compelling, verifiable success stories upfront would shore up investor confidence and accelerate the path to close.

Execution, however, required bandwidth Ivan didn’t have. Orchestrating customer outreach, conducting in-depth interviews, and turning raw conversations into polished, on‑brand assets demand hours of focused work and constant context‑switching. Rather than diverting focus from Daytona’s product roadmap, Ivan decided to find a dedicated partner to own the customer storytelling process end to end.

Finding the right partner required more than content expertise. Generalist agencies and freelance writers couldn’t match the technical fluency that Daytona’s product and customers demand. To ensure customer stories hold up in technical conversations, Ivan needed a team fluent in agent-native infrastructure and developer workflows that could turn complex systems into compelling narratives.

That’s when one of his investors introduced him to Verbatim. The agency’s track record with high-growth B2B startups and deeply technical products across verticals gave Ivan the confidence he’d found the right partner for Daytona’s needs. 

“There’s no world in which I could run our social proof function myself. We needed a trusted partner who could take this off my plate entirely and turn our customer stories into growth levers. Verbatim was that partner.”

Solution

A case study flywheel that captures technical depth, builds trust, and accelerates investor conversations‍

Onboarding Verbatim was quick and hands-on. The Verbatim team immersed itself in Daytona's positioning, product nuances, and target personas, then mapped the highest‑leverage customers into a robust case study pipeline. With that workflow, the first case study was ready for Ivan’s review in just 10 days.

Working with Verbatim quickly earned a label from Ivan: “magical.” He introduces a customer, and Verbatim’s team takes over end‑to‑end, running the interview, managing stakeholders, researching the customer's tech stack, and producing the story. Even after handoff, they stay hands-on, owning every detail from production to publication. “The team reached out to tell me about a website formatting detail after we published our first case study,” shares Ivan. “That moment showed me I could be fully hands-off with Verbatim.”

While that level of ownership was impressive, the substance of each case study is what truly cemented the partnership for Ivan. Each asset blends engineering detail, business impact, and compelling storytelling, showing how Daytona’s sandbox infrastructure, agent-native workflows, and developer tooling translate into real outcomes for the business.

That technical depth and specificity quickly turned Verbatim’s case studies into a cornerstone of Daytona’s GTM motion. By proving value across segments, from startups to enterprise teams, these case studies build market trust. And because they’re produced by an independent partner, they carry the authenticity that decision makers expect from verified evidence.

Each case study is paired with professionally edited video clips, giving Ivan impactful moments he can repurpose across channels and funnel stages. In a fast-moving AI infrastructure market, that mix of credible third-party proof and broad reach helps Daytona convert early interest into qualified pipeline and revenue.

The same proof that moved buyers also moved investors. During Daytona’s Series A, Ivan shared Verbatim’s case studies and videos with investors to showcase product-market fit and customer traction. This credible, third-party evidence helped diligence move faster and accelerated investor conversations.

Over time, Verbatim’s content created an unexpected benefit: it became a social signal. As more competitive companies were featured on Daytona’s site, new and existing customers asked to join that cohort — one company even reached out to request a case study of their own. That momentum now fuels Daytona’s social proof flywheel, where each win attracts the next.

“What makes Verbatim rare is that they treat the work like it's theirs. Every case study captures the technical depth of our product and how it solves meaningful problems for the customer. The writing is sharp, the detail is precise, and the value is clear to any prospect or investor.”‍

Results

Daytona powers 50% average MoM revenue growth with Verbatim‍

With Verbatim, Daytona has built a scalable library of customer proof that drives both pipeline and fundraising. For prospects, these stories accelerate buy-in before a single sales conversation. For investors, this independent, third-party validation helped Daytona close its $24M Series A.

• 50% average MoM revenue growth influenced by Verbatim content
• 20+ investors relied on Verbatim case studies for Series A diligence
• 92% reduction in time spent per asset

Daytona is already expanding its partnership with Verbatim beyond case studies, adding editorial content and more video assets to its content strategy. Together, these assets will help cement Daytona as an authoritative voice in the agent-native infrastructure category, generate inbound interest, and compress sales cycles.

“When you find a team that treats your content like it's their own, you don't stop at case studies. We're already expanding our partnership with Verbatim across editorial and video.”