OpenAI to buy coding startup Pierre, taking aim at GitHub

OpenAI will acquire Pierre Computer, a developer tools startup whose technology already runs inside Codex, the company told Axios in an exclusive report published Wednesday, November 4. The deal is OpenAI's latest move to own the infrastructure that stores, reviews and ships AI-generated code. That puts it in more direct competition with GitHub, the code-hosting platform owned by Microsoft ↗ 6.68%.axios.com

What OpenAI is buying

OpenAI plans to fold Pierre's Code Storage product into Codex, where the startup's technology is already in use, Axios reported. The companies did not disclose financial terms. Pierre's open-source projects will stay open-source.axios.com

Pierre describes itself on its corporate website as a maker of "low level, composable product infrastructure for machine work." The company says Code Storage is a high-scale, distributed storage system built on Git, with interfaces designed for machines rather than people. According to the product site, it "powers the largest agentic workloads in the industry." Pierre introduced Code Storage in October 2025 as a white-label Git infrastructure layer that developers can build into their own applications. The startup also publishes Code Storage SDKs for TypeScript, Python and Go.pierre.computer+3

A crowded challenge to GitHub

According to Axios, GitHub has suffered reliability problems and outages as AI coding has grown. Critics argue the platform was built for humans and that a large share of software is now written by AI agents. Axios also noted that OpenAI is not the only challenger. Cursor, now owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX, launched a GitHub rival called Origin in August, and former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced a competing product last month through his new startup.axios.com

The relationship with Microsoft adds a complication. Microsoft owns nearly a quarter of OpenAI even as the two companies compete in several markets, Axios reported.axios.com

Building on Pando

The acquisition comes two days after OpenAI introduced Pando, a Git-compatible backend that now runs all development in its monorepo. In OpenAI's engineering post on November 2, the company said Pando cut median push latency by nearly 80% and delivers almost a petabyte of Git data per day. OpenAI wrote that it built Pando with Codex in 10 weeks and that the system began serving production traffic in April.openai.com

The company said it built the system because Codex sharply increased the number of parallel branches, pushes and continuous-integration jobs hitting its repositories, according to Interesting Engineering. Pando is still internal. OpenAI says it is "exploring other uses for Pando," including "workloads where large numbers of agents need to collaborate on a shared Git repository," according to its engineering post.interestingengineering.com+1

As Axios put it, OpenAI is "moving beyond helping developers write code toward controlling more of the infrastructure where that code is stored, reviewed and shipped."axios.com