Managing and provisioning development environments can be difficult, but with the launch of Daytona, a new company that announced Sunday it raised $2 million in pre-seed funding, enterprises can more easily maintain their coding experiences in-house.

Daytona provides developers and engineering teams a way to manage their development environments, which means a space to do their coding without distraction from anywhere with access to integrated development environments, or IDEs. It also helps provision, configure and set up everything they need to collaborate and run projects concurrently under the hood.

There has already been quite a market for these sorts of managed environments. They provide IDEs in web browsers so developers can get set up with development environments and access their repositories from everywhere, referred to as cloud-based development environments.

One such service is known as GitHub Codespaces, launched in 2013. It provides a way for developers to quickly get going from anywhere they happen to set down their laptops. Other similar IDEs on the market include GitPod and Replit.

The same team behind Codespaces is behind Daytona, except the difference is that the newly launched service allows enterprise businesses to set up and manage their development environment behind their corporate firewalls where they have a better security posture. Daytona Chief Executive Ivan Ivan Burazin argues that although cloud-based development environments proliferate on the market, they suffer from a downgrade in security.

“Larger enterprises are warming up to the idea of CDEs due to the productivity and scalability,” said Burazin. “However, the security aspect of having it offered only as a SaaS solution rather than a self-hosted one is a no-go.”

As a result, big enterprise players end up diverting resources to piecemeal build their own self-hosted and managed internal development environments to maintain that security or must tack on security to a cloud IDE. Both of these lack a fundamental elegance that Burazin thinks could be solved by having a solution that would simply work out of the box and in-house.

“In an era where the emphasis should be on refining core products, diverting resources to develop and maintain a homegrown development environment manager is far from ideal,” said Burazin.

To raise its pre-seed funding, Daytona partnered with several venture capital firms, including 500 Global, Tiny.vc, Silicon Gardens, Darkmode VC and Firestreak Ventures. The round was also backed by a few big-name angel investors in the developer tools industry, including Christian Bach, cofounder of development platform Netlify Inc.; Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of Stack Overflow; Milin Desai, chief executive of Sentry; and Luke Kanies, founder of Puppet Labs Inc.

“I am impressed by Daytona’s commitment to elevating developer environments,” said Bach. “Their vision of simplifying the creation of standard and secure developer environments resonates with the broader goals of enhancing developer productivity.”

Daytona is currently in beta mode, and it allows enterprises to self-host their development environment. With a single command developers and operations can set up their entire environment and launch any IDE they want anywhere with a standardized backend on their own self-hosted cloud. This means that they can use any editor such as Visual Studio Code or JetBrains, the system itself is agnostic to the tooling. It also provides access to databases, compilers and other tools needed to build, test and deploy code, and in a way that remains the same across for any workspace.

The idea behind the setup is to step out of the way of the developer and let them get to the hard part of actually generating and maintaining code. Daytona does this by automating configuration across machines and development environments, which means that no matter where a developer needs access, everything is consistent and ready to go. The system also orchestrates and manages resources flexibly according to what’s available, be it a desktop or laptop local environment to assist with collaboration.

Because security is paramount, the platform allows for highly granular controls on roles and setups to permit security teams to maintain tight watch over what goes into and comes out of the environments. It can also be hosted in an “air-gapped” environment, which means that it doesn’t need to be connected to the internet at all. This permits a development team to maintain complete control over the work and data security.

Since the product is currently in closed beta mode, it is not yet generally available, but the company said in a blog post that the product has already gained customers in industries such as aerospace, banking and telecommunications.

The company said that the initial funds will be channeled towards product development of the underlying platform and hiring to expand the team. With so many companies out there in need of self-hosted solutions for their development environments, the company said that it will be intensifying its efforts for market penetration across industries where security is paramount.

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