The Kiel startup Ona is taken over by OpenAI – in one of the largest German exits in recent years. What’s behind the deal.
Once from Kiel to Silicon Valley to OpenAI please. That’s exactly what Johannes Landgraf, founder and CEO of Ona, did. His startup, which was founded in 2020 and specializes in secure cloud environments, was bought by the AI giant OpenAI. According to insiders, this is one of the largest German exits in recent years.
The idea behind Ona: Instead of writing and executing code locally on their own computer, developers should work in secure, reproducible environments in the cloud. According to the company, more than two million developers have already used the platform.
Strategic purchase for OpenAI’s Codex
The purchase is a strategic step for OpenAI: Codex, the AI assistant for software development, now has more than five million weekly users – a growth of 400 percent since the beginning of the year, as OpenAI reports.
The challenge: More and more companies want to use Codex not just for quick tasks, but for complex workflows that run for hours or days. To do this, the AI assistant needs a safe place where it can work permanently – in the infrastructure of the respective company, not on a single device.
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“Agents need more than intelligence — they need a trustworthy workspace,” says Landgraf. Ona should deliver exactly that: cloud environments with the control and compliance requirements that companies demand.
Thibault Sottiaux, who is responsible for the Codex product at OpenAI, adds: Companies wanted powerful agents that do real work – but under the security and control conditions of their own environments. Ona should help make exactly that possible.
Second big exit for Speedinvest
The first and largest investor in Ona was Speedinvest. This is the second major AI exit within a few weeks for the Viennese VC: The Austrian startup Emmi AI recently made the jump to Mistral.
Oliver Holle, CEO of Speedinvest, interprets this as a signal: “European founders are building technologies that even the world’s leading AI companies need in order to bring AI into practical use.”
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