Meta and OpenAI Buy AI Coding Startups on the Same Day

Two of the biggest AI companies bought developer-tools startups on Wednesday, 4 November. Conductor, whose app lets engineers run a team of AI coding agents at once, said it is joining Meta. The same day OpenAI said it will acquire Pierre Computer Company, the maker of the Code Storage service, to strengthen Codex, its coding agent. Neither company disclosed a price.

The deals show where the AI race has moved: from the models themselves to the tools developers use to put many agents to work at the same time, and the systems that store what those agents write.

Meta takes Conductor

Conductor lets a developer create isolated copies of a codebase, run an AI agent in each one, then review and merge the results. It does not build its own models: it runs agents from other labs, including Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, TechCrunch reports. Meta confirmed the deal to TechCrunch but declined to share terms. Axios first reported it.

The startup launched its app in July 2025 and in March raised a $22 million Series A from Matrix and Spark, with Y Combinator also investing. At the time it said its user base had grown tenfold since January and that engineers at Google, Meta, Amazon and Spotify used the app, both claims made by the company.

Chief executive Charlie Holtz said the team has "big, crazy plans for the next interface" and promised something new early next year. According to TechCrunch, he will work with Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta launched its own coding agent, Muse Code, in August.

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OpenAI buys Pierre for Codex

Pierre's main product, Code Storage, is git infrastructure built for machines rather than people. The company says AI app builders including Lovable, Bolt and Poke use it to store the code and other files their agents generate. Pierre also makes the open-source Diffs and Trees libraries, which Codex already uses to show file trees and code changes, according to Investing.com, via Yahoo Finance.

OpenAI plans to build Code Storage into Codex and says Pierre's open-source projects will stay available to developers. The deal still needs regulatory approval, and the two companies will operate separately until it closes. The Information also reported the agreement. The purchase pushes Codex closer to GitHub's territory, owned by Microsoft, as OpenAI competes with Anthropic for paying coding customers, a fight TheStak covered last month.