The Idea
In Kiel, Germany, around 2018, Sven Efftinge was sick of a problem most developers had simply learned to live with: setting up a working environment was miserable. Every new project meant hours, sometimes days, installing dependencies, configuring tooling, and chasing the oldest excuse in software, "it works on my machine." Efftinge knew the territory better than almost anyone. He led Eclipse Theia, the open-source browser IDE built at his company TypeFox. Alongside Johannes Landgraf, a former corporate-finance hand from KPMG and Allianz, he reckoned the fix was obvious. Stop fighting local machines. Move the entire environment into the cloud. One click from any GitHub URL, and you are ready to code, with the same setup every time, for every developer on the team. No more "works on my machine," because there was no machine to break. This was the beginning of Gitpod, the company now known as Ona.
The Execution
- 2019: Gitpod launches publicly out of Kiel, a browser-based development environment that spins up ready-to-code workspaces in Docker containers from any Git repository, built on the open-source Theia IDE.
- October 2020: Raises a $3M seed round from Crane Venture Partners, Speedinvest and Vertex Ventures, and ships native GitLab integration.
- April 2021: Banks a $13M round led by General Catalyst and quietly swaps Theia for full VS Code in the browser, putting cloud parity with local setups.
- November 2022: Closes a $25M Series A led by GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner, tripling its valuation, with 750,000+ developers on the platform. Landgraf becomes sole CEO. Total raised reaches $41M, and Gitpod coins its own category: Cloud Development Environments.
- September 2025: Bets the company on a re-founding. Gitpod becomes Ona, pivoting the same sandboxed-cloud tech from "dev environments for humans" to "mission control for AI software engineering agents." The line in the announcement: IDEs defined the last era, agents define the next.
- Early 2026: Ona scales to roughly 79 employees on an estimated $7M of 2025 revenue, running agents inside customers' own clouds for enterprises like BNY, Pearson and Hargreaves Lansdown, with SOC 2 and Fortune 500 deployments.
- June 11, 2026: OpenAI announces it will acquire Ona to give its Codex agent persistent cloud sandboxes that keep working for hours after the developer closes the laptop. Terms undisclosed, though IDC pegs the likely price around $450M to $500M.
- Today: Ona's secure execution layer becomes the place OpenAI's agents go to work, the unglamorous infrastructure underneath the most-hyped product in software, now part of OpenAI pending regulatory approval.
The lesson?
Ona spent seven years hardening boring infrastructure, sandboxed, ephemeral, secure cloud environments, to solve a deeply human problem: getting code to run the same way for everyone. When AI agents arrived, that same plumbing turned out to be exactly what an autonomous agent needs to run safely and unsupervised for hours. They didn't chase the moment with a flashy new model. They re-founded the company around the substrate they'd already built. The best founders set out to fix "works on my machine." Ona's reward was owning the machine the work now runs on.