OpenAI to acquire Ona, formerly Gitpod, to give Codex persistent cloud sandboxes

OpenAI said on June 11 it has agreed to acquire Ona, the startup formerly known as Gitpod, to give its Codex coding agent persistent cloud environments where long tasks can run unattended.

The acquisition targets a practical limit on AI agents: most stop when the developer's machine does. Ona's technology provides secure, cloud-based environments that persist after a workstation shuts down, letting agent tasks continue across hours or days. Folding that into Codex would let OpenAI's agents take on longer, multi-step jobs without a developer keeping a session open.

OpenAI did not disclose financial terms, and the deal is subject to regulatory approval; the companies will operate separately until it closes. Ona has helped 2 million developers work in reproducible cloud environments and already shares customers with OpenAI, the company said. After closing, the Ona team will join OpenAI's Codex group.

Codex has grown quickly: OpenAI says more than 5 million people now use it each week, up 400 percent from earlier in 2026, and that it has expanded from software development into a wider range of complex work.

"Enterprises want powerful agents that can do real work while meeting the security and control requirements of their environments," said Thibault Sottiaux, core products lead at OpenAI. Johannes Landgraf, co-founder and chief executive of Ona, said agents "need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace."

The usage and growth figures come from OpenAI and have not been independently verified, and because terms were withheld, the deal's price and any conditions remain unknown. Until the acquisition clears review, the integration is an intention rather than a shipped capability.

The purchase follows OpenAI's March 2026 acquisition of Promptfoo, which added cybersecurity and red-teaming features to its Frontier platform, and points to a strategy of buying the runtime and security plumbing that enterprise customers say agents still lack.