OpenAI acquires Ona to give 5 million Codex users cloud agents

OpenAI agreed to acquire Ona, a startup providing secure cloud environments for autonomous AI agents, in a deal that will embed persistent computing into its Codex coding tool used by more than 5 million people weekly.

"Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace," Johannes Landgraf, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ona, said in a statement.

Financial terms weren't disclosed. Ona's team and cloud technology will join OpenAI's Codex division after the deal closes, subject to regulatory approvals. Codex now supports more than 5 million weekly active users, up from 3 million in April, and has expanded beyond software developers to roles including sales, investment banking and equity investing. Knowledge workers now account for roughly one in five Codex users and are growing at more than triple the rate of core developers, OpenAI said.

The acquisition highlights a broader industry shift toward AI agents capable of executing multi-step tasks without human intervention. Ona's platform provides the persistent, secure infrastructure needed to keep these agents running continuously in the background. The deal follows OpenAI's partnership with Visa to let AI agents handle financial transactions and comes as the company races against Anthropic — whose Claude Code assistant has driven strong growth — toward an initial public offering.

Ona's technology creates pre-configured cloud environments stocked with the tools, systems and context required for AI agents to complete long-running software lifecycle tasks such as automated vulnerability scanning, application modernization and testing. Once integrated, the combined teams will focus on helping engineering workflows safely tackle these extended assignments, OpenAI said.

"I always thought selling the company would feel like an ending. Instead, it feels like our life's work just got bigger and more important," Landgraf wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The Ona deal is one of several acquisitions OpenAI has made in recent months. The company bought Promptfoo, a cybersecurity startup, in March; Torch, a health-care technology company, for about $60 million in January; and io, a device-focused startup founded by Jony Ive, for more than $6 billion in May.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidential prospectuses with the Securities and Exchange Commission as they weigh public offerings, according to Bloomberg. The competition between the two companies has intensified as they race to dominate the AI coding assistant market, with each seeking to demonstrate that their agents can handle increasingly complex enterprise workflows.

Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's core products lead, said Ona will help Codex deploy more easily across production workflows for customers operating "at the highest standards of trust and scale."

OpenAI shares, which trade on the private market, have been valued at roughly $687 per share in recent tender offers, according to reports. The company's push into agentic AI through acquisitions and partnerships signals an expectation that autonomous coding and enterprise workflows will drive the next phase of revenue growth, intensifying pressure on Anthropic and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot to keep pace.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.