OpenAI buys Ona to give Codex a cloud that keeps running after the laptop closes

The German startup formerly known as Gitpod will power customer-controlled environments where Codex agents run for hours or days.

OpenAI announced Thursday it’ll acquire Ona, the German cloud-environment startup formerly known as Gitpod, in a bet that the next bottleneck for coding agents isn’t intelligence but somewhere to live. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The companies will remain separate until the deal clears regulators.

The strategic logic is legible the moment you look at the usage curve. OpenAI says Codex now has more than 5 million weekly users, up from 3 million in April and a claimed 400 percent rise from earlier in the year. Agents that run for hours or days need persistent state, repo access, and the keys to internal systems. They can’t live on a laptop that closes at 6pm.

Ona’s pitch is what OpenAI calls “secure, persistent environments where agents can access the tools, systems, and context they need to make progress over time.” Its customer-controlled execution model lets Codex agents run inside the customer’s own cloud, with OpenAI supplying the model and the orchestration layer on top. Ona claims it’s already served 2 million developers, and shares multiple customers with OpenAI.

“Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace,” said Johannes Landgraf, Ona’s co-founder and CEO. The framing is doing real work: enterprises won’t hand source code to an agent that executes on someone else’s metal.

The deal also sits inside a noisier sequence. OpenAI filed its S-1 confidentially with the SEC on Monday, days after Anthropic filed its own, and Codex competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code, whose user numbers Anthropic doesn’t disclose. The buying run has been relentless: Hiro Finance in April, Promptfoo in March, Torch for roughly $60 million in January, Software Applications last October, and Jony Ive’s hardware venture io for more than $6 billion in May 2025.

Each acquisition closes a different surface, model, security, devices, finance, and now the substrate the agents actually run on. The pre-IPO shopping list is becoming a map of where OpenAI thinks the moat will sit.