OpenAI to acquire Ona

Today we’re announcing that OpenAI will acquire Ona⁠(opens in a new window), bringing its secure cloud execution and orchestration technology into our rapidly expanding Codex ecosystem.

More than 5 million people use Codex each week to research, analyze, build, and automate their work—up 400% from earlier this year. Codex began as a tool for software developers and now helps a wider range of people do complex work from an initial request through to a finished result.

As Codex becomes more capable, its most valuable work is unfolding over hours or days, rather than minutes. We believe people should be able to delegate more ambitious work without remaining tied to the machine where it began. The work should continue beyond the initial session, with Codex making it possible to stay connected and check progress, provide direction, make decisions, and review results from anywhere.

Ona will help us do that. Its technology provides secure, persistent environments where agents can access the tools, systems, and context they need to make progress over time.

By bringing Ona to OpenAI, we will expand Codex beyond work tied to a single device or active session and help more organizations deploy agents securely in production.  

Giving Codex a persistent place to work

Ona has spent years helping developers move software development from local machines into the cloud. The company has helped 2 million developers work in secure, reproducible cloud environments and supports multiple shared customers. 

That experience is directly relevant to the next phase of Codex, enabling agents to continue working inside a customer’s cloud environment even when laptops are closed.

Scaling Codex across production workflows

As organizations move from experimenting with agents to deploying them across production workflows, capable models are only one part of what they need.