OpenAI announced Thursday that it will acquire Ona, the German developer-tools company formerly known as Gitpod, to let its Codex coding agents run long, autonomous jobs inside customers' own cloud environments. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Ona provides secure, persistent, pre-configured cloud workspaces — stocked with the tools, credentials and context an AI agent needs to keep working over time. Its 'customer-controlled execution' model lets agents operate inside a company's own infrastructure, keeping source code, credentials and audit trails on the customer's side rather than OpenAI's.
That capability addresses the central limitation of today's coding agents: tasks that outlast a laptop session. With Ona's infrastructure, OpenAI says, Codex jobs can stretch from minutes to hours or days, continuing while the developer's machine is closed.
Codex has been one of OpenAI's fastest-growing products. More than 5 million people now use it weekly, up from roughly 3 million in April — a more than sixfold increase since its desktop app launched in February. Knowledge workers outside the core developer base account for about a fifth of users and are growing at triple the rate of developers.
'Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace,' Ona co-founder and chief executive Johannes Landgraf said. 'I always thought selling the company would feel like an ending. Instead, it feels like our life's work just got bigger and more important.'
Ona rebranded from Gitpod in late 2025 and says its platform has served some two million developers. Once the deal clears standard closing conditions, its employees will join OpenAI's Codex team.
The acquisition sharpens an enterprise contest with Anthropic, whose Claude Code product has driven much of its own growth, and extends an OpenAI buying spree that already includes the security startup Promptfoo and Jony Ive's hardware venture io. With both companies holding confidential IPO filings at the SEC, enterprise traction has become the metric each is most eager to demonstrate.