en.Wedoany.com Reported - OpenAI announced on Thursday that it has acquired Ona (formerly Gitpod), a cloud development environment (CDE) provider with 79 employees, aiming to accelerate the adaptation of its agentic AI to enterprise needs.
In a statement, OpenAI said Ona's technology provides secure and persistent environments where agents can access tools, systems, and context to progressively advance their work. Through the acquisition, OpenAI plans to extend Codex beyond single devices or active sessions, helping more organizations deploy agents securely in production environments.
Johannes Landgraf, CEO of Ona, stated in the announcement that Ona provides the modules agents need for enterprise work: trusted, customer-controlled cloud environments that enable work to persist across devices and within the systems where software actually resides. Landgraf also noted that since the beginning of 2026, weekly Ona agent sessions have grown 13-fold among some of the world's most demanding institutions, including the oldest bank in the United States, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Europe, and one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in Asia.
Arnal Dayaratna, Vice President of Software Development Research at IDC, said IDC data shows Ona's annual revenue was approximately $7 million in 2025. He estimates Ona's 2026 revenue could be between $10 million and $15 million. Based on a typical acquisition price of about 30 times revenue, the acquisition amount could be around $450 million to $500 million. IDC believes that regardless of the exact price, this could be a good move for OpenAI, as it previously lacked a secure area to protect enterprise autonomous agent work that also supports memory functionality.
In its published First Take analysis, Gartner noted that this acquisition will bring Codex key scaling capabilities it previously lacked, while also prompting enterprises to weigh the trade-offs between a specific vendor's integrated stack and maintaining vendor neutrality. Gartner also mentioned that the acquisition appears to be OpenAI's response to Anthropic's support for self-hosted sandboxes in Claude Managed Agents since May 2026.
Tom Findling, CEO of Conifers.ai, believes OpenAI's concerns about Anthropic played a significant role in this deal. He stated that OpenAI is trying to ensure Codex reaches enterprise readiness before Anthropic gains a clear advantage. In the enterprise market, competition lies not only in model intelligence but also in making AI agents sufficiently secure and practical for large companies to actually deploy.
Jason Andersen, Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, echoed similar views. He believes OpenAI and Codex have ceded some ground to Anthropic and Claude Code. Andersen emphasized that OpenAI needs to position itself not just as a model provider, but to enhance competitiveness by offering stronger enterprise coding infrastructure. He also noted that enterprise-level development spending is increasing, and these customers have higher requirements for governance and security.
Jeremy Roberts, Senior Director at Info-Tech Research Group, stated that Ona provides Codex with a workspace that enterprises can run within their own virtual private cloud, featuring governance, persistence, and an environment that enterprises can control themselves, including log management, credential management, and resource access capabilities. This enables IT departments to ensure that agent actions are properly authenticated and effectively controlled, preventing models from performing operations they should not.
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