OpenAI has agreed to acquire Ona, a startup specializing in cloud execution environments for AI agents. The financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed, but OpenAI said Ona’s team will join its Codex division, the group responsible for the company’s rapidly growing AI software-engineering platform. The acquisition comes as Codex has reportedly grown to more than 5 million weekly users, making it one of OpenAI’s fastest-scaling agent products.
A key reason behind the acquisition is that while AI models are becoming smarter, they still need secure computing environments where they can actually carry out tasks. OpenAI launched Codex in 2025 as a cloud-based software engineering agent that can write new features, fix bugs, answer questions about codebases, run tests, and create pull requests. Each Codex task runs inside its own isolated cloud sandbox, allowing multiple assignments to be handled at the same time without interfering with one another. As AI agents become more advanced, managing these secure execution environments becomes much more challenging. This is exactly the area where Ona specializes.
Ona was built specifically to solve that challenge. The company evolved from Gitpod, a well-known cloud development environment provider, before repositioning itself around autonomous software-engineering agents. Its platform allows AI systems to operate in isolated execution environments with enterprise-grade controls, audit logs, policy enforcement, and virtual private cloud deployment options. Rather than keeping code and data inside a vendor’s infrastructure, Ona allows agents to run directly inside a customer’s AWS or Google Cloud environment, a capability that is increasingly important for regulated industries and large enterprises concerned about security and compliance.
The acquisition also shows OpenAI’s new strategy of turning Codex into a full software-development platform rather than a coding assistant. Notably, earlier this year, the company announced the acquisition of Astral, the creator of popular Python tools like Ruff and uv, specifically to strengthen the Codex ecosystem. And now, Ona adds another critical layer by providing the runtime infrastructure that allows autonomous agents to execute work safely and continuously.
Meanwhile, the deal is still awaiting the necessary regulatory approvals and other standard closing requirements. Until the acquisition is officially completed, OpenAI and Ona will continue to operate as separate and independent companies.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
