Flick Gocke Schaumburg advises Ona in acquisition by OpenAI

Flick Gocke Schaumburg has advised the German AI start-up Ona on its acquisition by OpenAI.

Ona provides enterprise customers a platform allowing software agents to work securely in a cloud environment after the developer who started the task logs off. By joining OpenAI, the Ona team will work with the Codex team to advance secure, persistent enterprise execution capabilities and help scale Codex to more enterprises worldwide.

The transaction officially closed on August 10, 2026 and Ona is now part of OpenAI.

Advisers to Ona: Flick Gocke Schaumburg

Matthias Full (lead, M&A Tax), Prof. Dr Jan Bron (Corporate Tax), Corina Hackbarth (M&A Tax); Associate: Mauritz Müller (M&A Tax)

Flick Gocke Schaumburg provided tax advice on the transaction.

Ona was founded in 2020 and is a provider of persistent cloud environments for software development. Within these environments, client-controlled AI agents operate autonomously, with access to tools and context within the respective company’s infrastructure, in reproducible cloud sandboxes and subject to company-specific security and governance controls.

OpenAI, founded in 2015, is one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies and the developer of the GPT family of models as well as applications such as ChatGPT or DALL·E. With the acquisition of Ona, OpenAI is expanding its Codex ecosystem for stronger regulated companies.<<<