OpenAI agreed on June 11, 2026 to acquire Ona, the cloud development company from Kiel, Germany, that was known as Gitpod until late 2025. Ona's technology for running AI agents in secure, persistent cloud environments will be added to Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, and the Ona team is joining the Codex group.
Terms were not disclosed. The deal needed regulatory approval, and the two companies said they would stay separate until it closed, with Ona continuing to serve customers under its existing commitments. Ona later updated its announcement to say the transaction closed on August 10, 2026.
Co-founder and chief executive Johannes Landgraf announced the deal in a blog post. He wrote that he had not been thinking about a sale three months earlier and that conversations with OpenAI's leadership and the Codex team had changed his mind.
What Ona built
Gitpod started from the idea that software development should not be tied to a single laptop. Developers could open a project from any device and get a ready-to-use coding environment in the cloud. The Decoder reported that the company was founded in Kiel in 2020, and The Next Web reported that it had served about two million developers.
After renaming itself Ona, the company rebuilt its product around AI agents. Its platform gives agents reproducible environments that can run inside a customer's own cloud, with scoped credentials, audit trails, orchestration and security controls. Landgraf wrote that weekly agent sessions in production had grown 13 times since the start of the year. Customers he described, without naming them, included the oldest bank in the US, one of Europe's largest pharmaceutical companies and one of Asia's largest sovereign wealth funds.
InfoWorld reported that Ona had 79 employees. The company did not disclose its revenue.
“I always thought selling the company would feel like an ending. Instead, our life's work is getting bigger and more important.”
Why OpenAI is buying
OpenAI said Ona provides secure, persistent environments where agents can reach the tools, systems and context they need to make progress over time. Once integrated, Codex should be able to continue tasks over hours or days, even after a user closes their laptop. Ona's approach, which it calls customer-controlled execution, lets agents run in a company's own cloud: OpenAI supplies the models and orchestration, while the customer keeps its data, credentials and audit trail.
OpenAI said that more than five million people were using Codex each week, about 400% more than at the start of the year. Coverage of the deal by The Decoder, The Next Web and InfoWorld presented it as a response to Anthropic's Claude Code in the market for coding agents. Gartner said the deal gave Codex scaling capability it had lacked, and described it as a possible answer to Anthropic's support for self-hosted sandboxes in Claude Managed Agents, which began in May 2026.
Ona was not OpenAI's first developer-tools purchase of the year. In March it acquired Astral, the maker of the Python tools uv and Ruff, according to The Decoder.
The founders and the funding
In April 2021 Gitpod raised $13 million from General Catalyst, with Speedinvest, Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures taking part, Tech.eu reported. In November 2022 it raised a $25 million Series A led by GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner. SiliconANGLE reported that General Catalyst, Crane Venture Partners, Vertex Ventures US, Speedinvest, Pebblebed, GTMfund and MongoDB Ventures also invested. At that time the company said more than 750,000 developers used Gitpod.
In his post, Landgraf thanked the company's investors but did not say how much Ona had raised in total.
What analysts said
Analysts quoted by InfoWorld mostly saw the deal as a practical one. Jeremy Roberts of Info-Tech Research Group called Ona a boring company, but not in a bad way, and said the capability was necessary for OpenAI because it gives IT teams a controlled environment they can govern. IDC's Arnal Dayaratna described the purchase as a sensible buy-versus-build decision for a company that lacked a safe environment for autonomous enterprise agents.
Gartner also said that enterprises would have to weigh the benefits of an integrated stack from one vendor against the flexibility of tools that work with any vendor.
