Enterprise

OpenAI to acquire Ona, giving Codex agents a place to keep working after the laptop closes

The deal — terms undisclosed — folds the secure cloud-execution startup formerly known as Gitpod into Codex, letting agents run for hours or days inside a customer's own cloud.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-06-14 · 4 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Taylor Vick — Rows of servers in a cloud data center, lit blue.

OpenAI on June 11 said it’ll acquire Ona, the secure cloud-execution platform formerly known as Gitpod GmbH, and fold its sandboxes into Codex. Terms weren’t disclosed. The strategic shape of the deal is plainer than its price: Codex agents are increasingly being asked to run for hours or days, and they need somewhere to keep running after the developer’s laptop sleeps.

Ona’s pitch, condensed by co-founder and CEO Johannes Landgraf, gets at the same problem from the other side. “Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace,” he said. The workspace, in this case, is a reproducible cloud environment that can sit inside a customer’s own cloud while OpenAI supplies the model and the orchestration. That split matters to enterprise buyers who’ve spent two years asking where exactly the code and the secrets live.

The numbers explain the urgency. OpenAI says more than 5 million people use Codex each week, with weekly usage up 400% from earlier this year. Ona has hosted 2 million developers in its environments and already shares customers with OpenAI. Stitching the two together is less an expansion than a regularization of what large engineering organizations were already piecing together themselves.

The competitive frame is Anthropic, whose Claude Code has driven a year of explosive growth and whose presence is now felt in every OpenAI developer-tools decision. Both companies filed confidentially for IPOs within days of each other this week, which gives the Ona deal a second reading: pre-listing housekeeping, with the agent-runtime layer brought in-house before public investors get to ask about it.

It’s also the fifth tuck-in of a busy year. OpenAI announced the Promptfoo deal in March, bought health-care startup Torch in January for roughly $60 million, picked up Software Applications and its Sky interface in October 2025, and absorbed Jony Ive’s io for more than $6 billion last May. Ona and OpenAI remain independent until close.

A capabilities company is quietly becoming an infrastructure company, one acquisition at a time.

Sources