OpenAI buys Ona to give Codex agents a persistent cloud workspace

The Gitpod-descended startup's customer-controlled execution layer will let Codex agents keep running for hours or days inside an enterprise's own cloud.

OpenAI on Thursday agreed to acquire Ona, the Gitpod-descended startup that runs secure, customer-controlled cloud execution environments for AI agents, and will fold the team into its Codex division once regulators sign off. Terms weren’t disclosed.

The framing is infrastructure, not talent. OpenAI says Codex’s most valuable runs now stretch “hours or days, rather than minutes,” which means the bottleneck has shifted from model quality to the question of where, exactly, an agent lives while its user is offline. Ona’s answer is that it lives inside the customer’s own cloud perimeter, on a workspace Ona has already shipped to 2 million developers.

“Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace,” said Johannes Landgraf, co-founder and CEO of Ona, in the announcement.

The usage numbers explain the urgency. More than 5 million people now use Codex each week, up 400% from earlier this year. Roughly 20% of those users are non-developers, a cohort growing more than three times as fast as the developer base. Codex, in other words, is leaking out of the engineering org and into adjacent enterprise workflows that demand audit logs and a defensible security boundary.

That maps neatly onto the company’s revenue mix. CFO Sarah Friar expects enterprise customers to climb from 40% of OpenAI’s business to 50% by year-end, and a long-running coding agent that won’t run inside a Fortune 500 VPC isn’t going to get there.

“Ona will help us make Codex easier to deploy securely across production workflows for customers operating at the highest standards of trust and scale,” said Thibault Sottiaux, Core Products Lead at OpenAI.

Landgraf, posting on LinkedIn, struck the tone of a founder who had read the strategic memo. “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.”

It’s the GitHub-into-Microsoft playbook at a finer resolution: buy the substrate the agents already prefer, before someone else turns it into a moat.