OpenAI announced it has reached a deal to acquire Ona (formerly Gitpod), a cloud development environment and agent sandbox platform. After the deal closes, the Ona team will join OpenAI's Codex team.
The core technology behind the acquisition is Ona's secure cloud execution and orchestration, which will give Codex agents a persistent, customer-controlled environment in the cloud. That means agents can keep running tasks for hours or days even when the user's device is shut down or offline.
Codex now has five million weekly active users, a 400 percent increase since the beginning of the year. Ona has already helped over two million developers move their software development workflows from local machines to the cloud. Going forward, enterprise users will have full control over the environment, access permissions, credential scope, and log monitoring for their agents — letting them bring Codex into production while maintaining security and compliance.
The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval. Until then, the two companies will operate independently.