OpenAI buys Ona to give Codex agents a cloud workspace that outlives the laptop

The deal folds the former Gitpod's customer-controlled sandboxes into Codex, plugging the persistence gap for long-running agents.

OpenAI said Thursday it’ll acquire Ona, the German startup formerly known as Gitpod, to give its Codex coding agents a place to live when the developer’s laptop is closed. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the deal is subject to regulatory approval; until close, the two companies operate separately.

The technical gap being filled is unglamorous but defining. Codex sessions don’t survive a lid shut, and an agent that can’t outlast its operator isn’t really an agent. Ona’s pitch was always the workspace layer: isolated, persistent, customer-controlled cloud sandboxes where data, scoped credentials, and audit trails stay on the buyer’s side of the line while the model provider supplies intelligence. “Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace,” Ona co-founder and CEO Johannes Landgraf wrote in the announcement. His full team joins the Codex group at close.

The numbers explain the urgency. Codex now has more than 5 million weekly users, up 400% from earlier this year. Ona, for its part, reports 13x growth in weekly agent sessions in production since January and 2 million developers served across its Gitpod and Ona eras, with a customer roster it describes as “the oldest bank in the US, one of Europe’s largest pharma companies, [and] one of Asia’s largest sovereign wealth funds.” That’s the enterprise procurement profile OpenAI needs to defend against Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has been quietly taking developer share.

“Ona will help us make Codex easier to deploy securely across production workflows,” said Thibault Sottiaux, Core Products Lead at OpenAI.

The deal lands in a crowded acquisition lane. OpenAI has absorbed Promptfoo, Software Applications, Torch, and Jony Ive’s io in short order, and filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday, days after Anthropic filed first this month. The Ona purchase is less a moonshot than an S-1 hardening exercise: every acquired capability that lets Codex bill enterprise seats instead of hobbyist API calls is a line item the bankers can point to.