OpenAI Acquires Ona to Add Persistent Cloud Execution to Codex

OpenAI has agreed to acquire Ona, a company that helps developers move software work from local machines into persistent cloud environments. The acquisition, reported Monday by IT Brief Australia, folds Ona's cloud execution and orchestration technology into Codex, OpenAI's developer platform that now sees more than 5 million weekly users — up 400% from earlier this year.

The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. Until it closes, the two companies will continue to operate separately.

The central problem Ona solves is session persistence. Current AI coding agents typically stop working when a user closes their laptop or ends a session. Ona's technology provides persistent cloud environments where agents can access tools, systems, and context over time — running for hours or days without being tied to a single machine.

That architectural change means developers could kick off a long‑running task inside Codex — like a multi‑file refactor with testing — and come back later to review results, provide direction, or continue from a different location. For enterprise teams, this addresses one of the main barriers to broader AI agent adoption in security‑sensitive or regulated settings.

Ona has spent several years building tools for secure, reproducible cloud workspaces, having supported 2 million developers according to IT Brief Australia. The two companies already share multiple customers, suggesting the integration path has been tested in production.

Once the deal closes, the Ona team is expected to join OpenAI and work with the Codex team on secure, persistent execution for enterprise use. OpenAI said the combined effort would support engineering teams across the full software lifecycle — testing, issue resolution, application modernization, vulnerability work, and other complex workflows that span time horizons beyond a single session.

Ona co‑founder and CEO Johannes Landgraf framed the deal around trust and control. "Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace," Landgraf said, IT Brief Australia reported. "We built Ona to give agents cloud environments with the context, control and collaboration enterprises require. Joining OpenAI lets us bring that foundation into Codex, helping organizations deploy agents with confidence and giving humans more agency over their work."

OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux framed the acquisition around deployment needs inside large organizations. "Enterprises want powerful agents that can do real work while meeting the security and control requirements of their environments," Sottiaux said, according to IT Brief Australia. "Ona will help us make Codex easier to deploy securely across production workflows for customers operating at the highest standards of trust and scale."

The acquisition reflects a wider market shift as companies move from testing AI agents in demos to deploying them across day‑to‑day business workflows. In that setting, infrastructure questions — where software runs, what systems it can access, how credentials are limited, how activity is logged — become critical blockers. Ona's architecture answers those questions by letting agents execute within the customer's own cloud boundary while OpenAI supplies the intelligence and orchestration layer.

For builders, the immediate signal is that Codex is evolving from a code‑completion and chat tool into a platform for long‑running autonomous work. The 5 million weekly user number — up 400% in months — suggests adoption is accelerating fast enough to justify acquiring infrastructure companies rather than building in‑house. Once the deal closes, developers building on Codex will gain the ability to dispatch agents that keep working after they close the tab.