OpenAI buys Ona to ready Codex for enterprise use
▼ Summary
– OpenAI acquired Ona (formerly Gitpod) to integrate its secure cloud platform into Codex, providing persistent environments for long-running coding agent tasks.
– Codex now has over 5 million weekly users, a 400% increase since early 2025, as AI coding agents become mainstream.
– Ona’s “customer-controlled execution” allows agents to run inside a company’s own cloud, keeping data, credentials, and audit trails with the customer.
– The acquisition aims to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code in the enterprise market, as both companies filed for IPOs and seek trust with large organizations.
– The deal requires regulatory approval but positions OpenAI to offer Codex in secure, enterprise-friendly environments, following other acquisitions like Promptfoo.
OpenAI has officially acquired Ona, the company formerly known as Gitpod, in a strategic move to strengthen its enterprise foothold. The acquisition, announced Thursday, integrates Ona’s secure cloud platform into Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. Financial terms of the deal were not made public.
Codex is experiencing explosive growth. According to OpenAI, more than 5 million users now rely on the tool each week, marking a 400 percent increase since the beginning of this year. The rise of AI coding agents has been swift, with one vibe-coding startup already hitting $500 million in revenue. The tasks Codex handles are also growing in complexity, expanding from minutes-long jobs to assignments that stretch across hours or even days.
Why OpenAI acquired Ona and what the deal brings
Long-running tasks need a reliable place to execute. Ona delivers secure, persistent cloud environments that allow an agent to keep working even after a developer closes their laptop. Modernizing a codebase or fixing a class of vulnerabilities no longer has to stop when the human logs off.
The real value here is control, not just speed. Ona’s customer-controlled execution model lets agents run directly inside a company’s own cloud infrastructure. OpenAI provides the intelligence; the customer retains ownership of the data, credentials, and audit trail. That is a trust-building pitch aimed squarely 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 into a US giant
Ona is not a new player. It started life as Gitpod, a German developer-tools company that shifted coding from local machines to the cloud. It claims to have served 2 million developers over its history. The company rebranded to Ona in late 2025 and refocused on AI agents. Now it becomes part of OpenAI.
“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 real battle is with Anthropic
This acquisition is part of a larger enterprise land grab. OpenAI is racing against Anthropic, whose Claude Code has driven a year of explosive growth. Both companies want to be the agent that large enterprises trust with production systems.
The timing is significant. OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday, just days after Anthropic did the same. Both firms now issue warnings about AI risk even as they sprint toward public markets. Codex revenue and enterprise credibility feed directly into the story they tell investors.
Ona is just one piece of a buying spree. OpenAI has recently acquired the cybersecurity startup Promptfoo and, last year, Jony Ive’s $6 billion hardware venture io. Each deal fills a specific gap. This one fills the gap that matters most for selling agents: running them where customers feel safe.
The deal still requires regulatory approval. Until it closes, the two companies will remain separate. But the direction is unmistakable. OpenAI wants Codex everywhere that serious work happens, and it just bought the plumbing to get there.
(Source: The Next Web)
