Ona is joining OpenAI · Ona

Johannes Landgraf<br>/June 11, 2026ProductAI

Ona is joining OpenAI<br>Our life's work just got bigger

1x

00:0000:00

I always thought selling the company would feel like an ending. Instead, our life's work is getting bigger and more important.

Today, we are announcing that Ona has entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.

Three months ago, this was not on my mind. Since the beginning of the year, weekly Ona agent sessions have grown 13x in production across some of the world's most demanding institutions: the oldest bank in the US, one of Europe's largest pharma companies, one of Asia's largest sovereign wealth funds and many others. The largest enterprises out there love the platform and are expanding more rapidly than ever before. But most importantly, I love building Ona. It is deeply personal, it gives me joy and energy, and I know the team feels the same. I did not become an entrepreneur to join another company.

The conversations with Sam, Tibo, and the Codex team changed that. Every single one made me and the team more excited about what we could create together, until we were convinced that we have to do this. Two things did it.

The first is what this is going to make possible for our customers. Ona brings the building blocks agents need for enterprise work: trusted, customer-controlled cloud environments where work continues across devices, inside the systems where software actually lives. OpenAI brings frontier intelligence, product polish, and a scale of research and distribution we could never reach alone.

The second reason is that I deeply connect with OpenAI's mission and plans for the future. AI should be accessible, abundant, safe and give every person and every organization more agency, not just a small elite. They chose a culture of empowerment and opportunity over fear and obligation. The Codex team is world-class, resilient, refreshingly fun, and light on ego. If the economy is going to accelerate, this is the team and place we want to help make that happen.

Together, we can help enterprises move AI work beyond individual coding sessions tied to a single laptop, toward cloud-based workflows across software and knowledge work, accessible from any laptop, phone, or tablet. In these workflows, agents take on real work and carry it forward inside secure cloud environments with the right access, context, tools, and state, under the enterprise's control. For our customers, the work we have been doing will now compound with OpenAI's ambition.

AI that enterprises can trust

Everybody thinks the enterprise is slow. But if you work with these companies, you know they do not lack imagination or ambition. The reason they are perceived as slow is because the cost of being wrong is high. A wrong change can break a customer workflow, expose sensitive data, violate a policy, or damage trust. And because every bank, pharma company, manufacturer, university, and public institution now runs on software, the ability to change that software safely shapes how quickly they can serve people, comply with regulation, and turn experiments into useful products. AI can increase the pace of work, but only if it also increases confidence. Speed without control is not enough.

“I can fire up an investigation of a security breach from a user on my phone while sitting in an internal meeting.”<br>– Customer quote<br>Beyond frontier intelligence, making quotes like the one above the norm takes three things. First, it needs context. Agents have to operate within the systems where enterprise work actually happens. Second, it needs control. Organizations need clear boundaries around data, deployment, credentials, permissions, and runtime. Third, it needs collaboration. Enterprise work is not single-player. People and agents need to work across teams, tools, and sessions, carrying state forward and making progress visible. The goal is not to remove people from the loop, but give them more agency over what is worth doing, and better tools for directing, reviewing, and improving the work.

“I don't see Ona as a product for only developers anymore. You can create diagrams or presentations or flow charts. The possibilities are endless.”<br>– Customer quote<br>We are at most 1% into the software the world needs. Much of it will be created by people who do not think of themselves as terminal power users, but who understand their customers, workflows, constraints, and goals. Every organization should be able to turn intent into software with far less friction, and with the safety and care the work deserves.

That is the future we want to build with OpenAI and the Codex team.

Cloud agents at work

Ona started from a simple belief: software development should not be trapped on a single laptop. A developer should be able to open any project from any device and immediately have the environment they need, in the cloud, with the code and tools ready-to-use.

“It exceeded my expectations, how...