Case Study
How Athena Intelligence Seamlessly Deploys AI Agents Across Regulated VPCs With Daytona

93%
faster sandbox provision times
6
specialized execution sandboxes consolidated into a unified layer
86%
faster engineer onboarding

Athena Intelligence is an AI platform that automates complex analysis and operational workflows for Fortune 500 enterprises in regulated industries — built by operators from SpaceX, IBM, and the Department of State.
Headquarters
New York, NY
Industry
Data Infrastructure and Analytics
Department
Artificial Intelligence Engineering
Key Features
Sandbox Creation Speed Sandbox Statefulness Infrastructure Scale
Learn how this enterprise AI technology company partnered with Daytona to provision customized cloud-agnostic sandboxes that ensure airtight isolation and performance across critical agent workflows.
Without Daytona, we would’ve missed out on a Fortune-500 opportunity. There’s no other runtime solution that could’ve handled their security and agent deployment requirements.

Brendon Geils
Founder and CEO at Athena Intelligence
01 -- CHALLENGE
Scaling Air-Gapped Agent Deployments With a Fragmented Vendor Stack
As an AI coworker built specifically for regulated industries, Athena operates directly within each client's Virtual Private Cloud. This self-hosted deployment enables Athena to run compliance reviews, analyze sensitive financial data, and audit M&A documents. However, as the company onboarded more Fortune 500 clients, Founder and CEO Brendon Geils recognized that efficient code execution required a new runtime approach.
To integrate Athena, Brendon and his team initially built custom client setups using runtime vendors specific to the agent task and the cloud infrastructure. But as new clients introduced distinct network configurations, access controls, and observability requirements, the number of required vendors increased disproportionately, generating substantial overhead.
Because each additional platform expanded Athena's attack surface, the risk of compliance drift compounded. To preserve client confidence in data security, the team spent significant effort on internal audits.
Ensuring scalable air-gapped deployments added another layer of complexity. Idle resources accumulated quickly across vendor runtimes, so Brendon needed to keep runtime compute ephemeral while client files persisted. Yet, without a unified storage layer, his team spent hours building custom integration logic between runtimes and various storage providers.
That ad‑hoc architecture obscured compute allocation, making it harder to deploy new agent capabilities while optimizing costs and resources. Because engineers were context-switching between APIs and deployment patterns, they also couldn't develop the system expertise needed to onboard quickly, streamline workflows, and build new features at pace.
To ensure Athena could scale across regulated environments, Brendon began exploring flexible runtime solutions. With vendors sunsetting their products or introducing latency, picking a tool to consolidate a patchwork of runtime providers wasn’t sustainable. What he needed was a runtime platform that dynamically provisioned the right isolated environment for key client workloads.
After evaluating several options, Brendon discovered Daytona. When he saw firsthand how the runtime platform handles non-standard, air-gapped deployment requirements, he knew he'd found the right partner.
We needed a runtime partner that wanted to support us and our clients' needs rather than push us to configure our setup just to use theirs. Daytona was the only platform that could deploy customized sandboxes across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Brendon Geils
Founder and CEO at Athena Intelligence
02 -- SOLUTION
A Cloud-Agnostic Runtime Platform That Adapts to Diverse Infrastructure Requirements
Within days of onboarding Daytona, Athena had deployed Python sandboxes across AWS, GCP, and Azure infrastructure, eliminating multi-vendor complexity with a single runtime solution.
Built to support all major cloud providers, Daytona enables Brendon to deploy agent workflows into every client environment. Using the platform’s SDKs, he tunes sandbox configurations such as snapshots, network policies, and access rules so Athena operates in fit‑for‑purpose runtimes.
This cloud-agnostic model extends to Daytona’s storage capabilities. Through Daytona's Volumes, files persist in an S3-compatible object store beyond individual sandboxes. For non-S3-compatible providers, Daytona's adaptability extends cross-cloud coverage. That way, agents remain stateful across AWS S3, Azure Blob storage, and Google Cloud Storage, preserving data across sessions without complex workarounds.
Storage persists independently, decoupling data from compute lifecycles. Each sandbox is provisioned with compute resources that Brendon has tailored to the task, then shuts down once the work completes, minimizing infrastructure spend.
With this setup, sandboxes remain lightweight so they spin up in milliseconds. As a result, Athena runs data analysis in Jupyter notebooks and edits executive presentations without perceptible delay. Every agent action feels truly responsive to the client’s request, delivering enterprise-grade deliverables without interruptions.
These performance benefits don’t require any engineering overhead. Instead, Brendon’s engineers focus on building deep expertise in Daytona’s runtime platform, driving workflow improvements and cost efficiencies. New hires also onboard faster, accelerating client outcomes.
That same consolidation tightens Athena's security posture, assuring clients that their data is protected. Because Daytona brings single‑tenant isolation and audit logging, Brendon’s team streamlines compliance audits, compressing the procurement cycle.
While Daytona’s versatile deployment quickly became foundational for Athena, the team’s collaborativeness sealed the partnership for Brendon. Daytona accommodates every infrastructure edge case, so Athena can create sandboxes in non-standard client setups, such as custom Kubernetes configurations. This support turns otherwise unattainable contracts into closed deals.
Once we had the first instance of Daytona, we started moving other infrastructure pieces. Without the complexity of multiple vendors, we handle what used to take two weeks in a single day.

Brendon Geils
Founder and CEO at Athena Intelligence
03 -- RESULT
Athena Provisions Sandboxes 93% Faster With Daytona
With Daytona, Athena replaced a fragmented vendor stack with a single runtime platform, enabling consistent deployment, monitoring, and scaling of agent workloads in air-gapped environments. This unified architecture accelerates time-to-market while maintaining compliance and engineering productivity.
93% faster sandbox provision times
6 specialized execution sandboxes consolidated into a unified layer
86% faster engineer onboarding
Looking forward, Brendon plans to integrate Daytona even more deeply into Athena’s workflows, where sandbox clusters will spin up dynamically as agents require computational resources. This expansion will unlock a new level of infrastructure scalability, enabling Athena to take on larger deployments while maintaining operational efficiency.
We want to work with teams who genuinely believe in our vision and engineering. Daytona is exactly that partner for us.

Brendon Geils
Founder and CEO at Athena Intelligence


