OpenAI buys Ona to give Codex a cloud home
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
OpenAI is acquiring Ona, the former Gitpod, to fold its cloud sandboxes for long-running coding agents into Codex. Terms undisclosed.
OpenAI said on June 11 that it is buying Ona, the German company formerly known as Gitpod GmbH. Ona’s team will join the group building Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, once the deal closes. Neither company disclosed a price.
Ona’s product gives a coding agent its own sandboxed development environment in the cloud. The selling point is persistence. An agent in one of these sandboxes keeps working after you close your laptop, which matters once a task runs for hours instead of minutes. SiliconANGLE reports that Codex now counts more than 5 million weekly users, and that Ona deletes each sandbox once the agent finishes with it.
Why this matters
If you use a coding agent, its working environment is about to be part of the subscription instead of something you run yourself. Convenient, and also a real dependency: the vendor’s cloud now holds your work in progress. The trade-offs in the solo operator’s AI stack apply here directly, and the switching-cost questions in how to choose AI tools for a small business are worth asking now, while moving is still cheap.
- 01OpenAI to acquire Onaopenai.com · primary
- 02OpenAI acquires AI agent orchestration startup Onasiliconangle.com · reporting
