OpenAI acquires Ona, the company once known as Gitpod, in its latest enterprise play. The deal, announced on Thursday, folds Ona’s secure cloud platform into Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. Terms were not disclosed.
Codex is on a tear. OpenAI says more than 5 million people now use it each week, up 400 per cent since early this year. AI coding agents have gone mainstream, with one vibe-coding startup reaching $500m in revenue. The work Codex does is also getting longer, stretching from minutes to hours or days.
Why OpenAI acquires Ona, and what it buys
Long jobs need somewhere to run. Ona provides secure, persistent cloud environments where an agent keeps working after the developer closes the laptop. Modernising a codebase or patching a class of vulnerabilities no longer stops when the human logs off.
The real prize is control, not raw speed. Ona’s “customer-controlled execution” lets agents run inside a company’s own cloud. OpenAI supplies the intelligence; the customer keeps the data, the credentials, and the audit trail.
That is a trust pitch aimed straight at nervous IT departments. “Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace,” said Ona co-founder and chief executive Johannes Landgraf.
A European startup, absorbed
Ona is not new. It began as Gitpod, a German developer-tools company that moved coding off local machines and into the cloud. It says it has served 2 million developers.
It rebranded to Ona in late 2025 and rebuilt itself around AI agents. Now it joins a US giant. “I always thought selling the company would feel like an ending,” Landgraf wrote on LinkedIn. “Instead, it feels like our life’s work just got bigger.”
The fight is with Anthropic
This is an enterprise land grab. OpenAI is racing Anthropic, whose Claude Code helped drive a year of explosive growth. Both want to be the agent that big companies trust with production systems.
The timing is loaded. OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday, days after Anthropic did the same. Both now warn about AI risk even as they sprint to list. Codex revenue, and enterprise credibility, feed an investor story too.
Ona is also one buy in a spree. OpenAI has lately picked up the cybersecurity startup Promptfoo and, last year, Jony Ive’s $6bn hardware venture, io. Each plugs a gap. This one plugs the gap that matters most for selling agents: running them where customers feel safe.
The deal still needs regulatory approval. Until it closes, the two stay separate. But the direction is clear. OpenAI wants Codex everywhere serious work happens, and it just bought the plumbing to get there.
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