OpenAI to Acquire Ona for Enterprise Coding Agent Execution

OpenAI has agreed to acquire Ona, a German startup that operates software agents inside a customer's own cloud infrastructure. The deal was announced Thursday and will fold Ona into Codex, OpenAI's coding agent. Codex now reaches more than 5 million people each week, a 400% increase since the start of the year, OpenAI said.

The agent has expanded from tasks lasting minutes to jobs that can run for hours or days, creating a need for secure execution environments.

For banks, hospitals and other regulated organizations, the central issue is governance. These entities must decide whether to allow autonomous agents to operate inside their networks, access their data and continue working without direct oversight.

Ona addresses this by providing sandboxed cloud workspaces, background agents that return pull requests, and guardrails including audit trails, role-based access and deployment inside a company's own virtual private cloud.

Ona began as Gitpod, a Kiel-based developer-tools company that moved coding into browser-based environments and reported serving 2 million developers. It rebranded in late 2025 and shifted its platform around agent technology. OpenAI supplies the model and orchestration while the agent runs inside the customer's cloud, keeping data, credentials and audit trails under company control.

The acquisition comes as OpenAI competes with Anthropic, whose Claude Code has expanded inside engineering teams. Both companies have filed confidential prospectuses with the SEC. OpenAI carries a valuation around $852 billion. The deal remains subject to regulatory approval.

A U.S. company acquiring a German firm that builds agent infrastructure could face review on both sides of the Atlantic. Ona currently allows enterprises to connect their own models through services such as Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. Under OpenAI ownership, that multi-model flexibility may change.