OpenAI to acquire Ona, giving Codex agents a persistent cloud workspace

The ChatGPT maker is folding the secure execution platform formerly known as Gitpod into Codex, letting AI coding agents keep running for hours or days after developers close their laptops.

OpenAI said Thursday it has agreed to acquire Ona, the 79-person German cloud-development platform formerly known as Gitpod, in a deal that gives its Codex coding agent a persistent execution environment inside customer infrastructure. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, though Bloomberg first reported the agreement before the official announcement. The strategic logic is what matters: Codex’s most valuable work, OpenAI says, is now “unfolding over hours or days, rather than minutes,” and an agent that runs that long needs somewhere to live when the laptop closes.

That somewhere is Ona, which rebranded from Gitpod in late 2025 around AI agents and has served 2 million developers in reproducible cloud workspaces. OpenAI says more than 5 million people now use Codex weekly, a 400% jump from earlier in the year.

The competitive subtext is unsubtle. Gartner, quoted by InfoWorld, framed the deal as “OpenAI’s response to Anthropic supporting self-hosted sandboxes in Claude Managed Agents, starting May 2026.” Tom Findling, chief executive of Conifers.ai, read it the same way, describing the acquisition “less as OpenAI taking out a small competitor and more as OpenAI trying to make sure Codex is enterprise-ready before Anthropic gets too far ahead.”

The price tag is where things get interesting. IDC research VP Arnal Dayaratna pegged Ona’s 2025 revenue at “roughly $7 million” and, applying a 30x multiple to a generous 2026 estimate, put the implied price “around $450 million or $500 million or so.” That’s a rich number for a platform business, and it tells you how OpenAI values the substrate underneath its agents.

Ona CEO Johannes Landgraf, who posted on LinkedIn that the deal “feels like our life’s work just got bigger and more important,” described the company’s mandate as building “trusted, customer-controlled cloud environments where work continues across devices, inside the systems where software actually lives.” OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux, the Core Products lead, said the combination makes Codex “easier to deploy securely across production workflows for customers operating at the highest standards of trust and scale.”

The deal fits a 2025 acquisition pattern: Promptfoo in March, Jony Ive’s hardware venture io for more than $6 billion in May, now Ona. OpenAI filed confidentially to go public on Monday, days after Anthropic did the same. The frontier labs are buying their enterprise stacks in public, on the clock.

OpenAI to acquire Ona, giving Codex agents a persistent cloud workspace

Sources