OpenAI acquires Ona, the company once known as Gitpod, in its latest enterprise play. The deal, announced on Thursday, folds Ona’s secure cloud platform into Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. Terms were not disclosed.
Codex is on a tear. OpenAI says more than 5 million people now use it each week, up 400 per cent since early this year. AI coding agents have gone mainstream, with one vibe-coding startup reaching $500m in revenue. The work Codex does is also getting longer, stretching from minutes to hours or days.
Why OpenAI acquires Ona, and what it buys
Long jobs need somewhere to run. Ona provides secure, persistent cloud environments where an agent keeps working after the developer closes the laptop. Modernising a codebase or patching a class of vulnerabilities no longer stops when the human logs off.
The real prize is control, not raw speed. Ona’s “customer-controlled execution” lets agents run inside a company’s own cloud. OpenAI supplies the intelligence; the customer keeps the data, the credentials, and the audit trail.
