Enterprise

OpenAI buys Ona to give Codex a persistent home inside the customer's cloud

The acquisition of the German cloud-execution startup formerly known as Gitpod gives OpenAI's coding agent a self-hosted sandbox — a direct answer to Anthropic's enterprise lead.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-06-13 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Florian Olivo — Lines of source code displayed on a developer's monitor

OpenAI said Thursday it’ll acquire Ona, the 79-person German company formerly known as Gitpod, in a deal IDC’s Arnal Dayaratna pegs at roughly $450 million to $500 million on a 30x multiple of Ona’s estimated $7 million in 2025 revenue (with 2026 projected at $10–$15 million). The price isn’t the story. The capability is: Ona gives Codex a place to actually run inside the customer’s own cloud.

That’s the gap Anthropic opened in May, when Claude Managed Agents began supporting self-hosted sandboxes, an option Gartner’s First Take on the deal flags as the proximate trigger. Regulated buyers, the oldest bank in the US, a top European pharma, an Asian sovereign wealth fund, all named by Ona CEO Johannes Landgraf as customers, don’t want autonomous coding agents executing inside vendor infrastructure they can’t audit. They want the agent in their VPC, behind their controls.

Ona, which served two million developers under its Gitpod identity before rebranding around AI agents late last year, already built that substrate. OpenAI is buying it rather than building it.

The numbers underneath the deal explain the urgency. OpenAI says more than five million people now use Codex weekly, up 400 percent since early this year. Landgraf says “weekly Ona agent sessions have grown 13x in production across customers including the oldest bank in the US, one of Europe’s largest pharma companies, and one of Asia’s largest sovereign wealth funds.” Both curves are bending into the same enterprise procurement cycle, where Claude Code, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and the Microsoft Agent Framework are already pitching the same CIOs.

The timing also rhymes with the capital markets. OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday, days after Anthropic filed its own. Acquisitions that sharpen the enterprise narrative aren’t incidental in that window; they’re the narrative. Buying Ona converts a structural deficit, no self-hosted execution, into a line item investors can underwrite. The deeper read is that the frontier-model war has quietly become a fight over whose runtime sits inside the Fortune 500’s firewall.

Sources