Case study
Building Ona's global field marketing engine through a rebrand, an ICP shift, and an acquisition
First and only global field marketer. $10M in pipeline in ten working months, through a rebrand from a developer tool to an enterprise AI company.
Context
I joined Ona, then Gitpod, as the first and only field marketer. Global remit. No field marketing function, no playbook, no pipeline target tied to events. I built it from nothing.
Ten months into 2025 the company did two hard things at once. It rebranded from Gitpod to Ona, and it repositioned the product from cloud development environments to AI coding agents running on that same infrastructure. The buyer changed with it. Before, we sold to platform engineering, bottom-up, one motion. After, we sold to two audiences at the same time: the AI-native engineers we already knew, and the CTOs, CIOs, and security leaders who decide whether AI is allowed near regulated systems.
That second audience is the whole game in enterprise AI. The pitch to them was specific. Secure, standardised agents that run inside the customer’s own cloud, with the data, the credentials, and the audit trail staying with the customer. That is what lets a bank or a pharma company put agents into production without losing control.
I owned the field marketing that took the company to those buyers, through the rebrand, while the revenue number was still due.
The number
My target was 35% of a $10M ARR goal. That is roughly $3.5M in contribution.
Enterprise deals are slow, so a pipeline target is not the same as a revenue target. At 3.2x coverage I needed about $11M in qualified pipeline to support my number. I produced $10M in sales-qualified pipeline in ten working months of 2025. Much of it is still open, because these are long enterprise cycles, and that is exactly what you would expect at this stage. I am telling you the pipeline figure, not a revenue figure, on purpose. Conflating the two is how marketers lose the trust of anyone who reads a board deck.
For about three of those ten months, the rebrand took a large share of my time. So the $10M was not ten clean months of field marketing. It was closer to seven, plus three of split focus while the company changed its name and its market underneath me.
Approach
Three things carried it.
Build the function, not just the calendar
First field marketer means you are also the ops, the reporting, and the enablement until someone else exists to do it. I set pipeline targets backwards from the sales number. I built the reporting so events could be measured against sourced pipeline, not attendance. And I am the designer and QA on the website, working with our web developer and pushing my own PRs to refine the design. At an AI dev-tools company, being able to live in the product and the repo is not a nice-to-have. It is how you market credibly to engineers.
Run two motions without breaking either
The ICP widened from platform engineering to a dual motion. Bottom-up to AI-native engineers, top-down to executives in regulated industries. Those audiences want different events, different rooms, different proof. I rebuilt the field plan to serve both at once, in the middle of a rebrand, without dropping the pipeline number.
Events as nodes, not endpoints
The clearest example is the Background Agents campaign.
We had mid-funnel content planned, webinars on specific enterprise use cases, but nothing at the top of the funnel to open the journey. Going straight in with product use cases gets the response most marketing gets: cynicism. So Lou, our content and product marketer, and I decided to build a top-of-funnel asset that did not look or feel like Ona marketing. An unbranded microsite that defined the category instead of selling the tool, with only a subtle nod to Ona at the foot of the page. Lou built the site itself, “The Self-Driving Codebase.”
Then we did not let the moment end there. We extended one launch into a chain of connected pieces:
- Three webinars on the use cases we had wanted to run all along: CVE remediation, GitHub and GitLab migrations, and COBOL migration.
- A background agents landscape, a diagram that maps the vendors across a market and shows where each one fits. Ours laid out the layers of infrastructure you need for background agents and which vendors cover which layer. Ona sat across several layers because the product does, but the piece stayed fair to competitors and was owned by the microsite, not Ona. Lou built this too.
- A Background Agents Summit, with speakers from Stripe, Harvey, Uber, and others talking about how they implemented background agents in their own companies.
Distribution was a team effort across me, Lou, Roman, and Philipp: launch on X and LinkedIn, a paid placement in the Dear Architects newsletter plus our own, leadership posting from the CEO, CTO, and Head of Engineering, employee activation to build social momentum, and timing that rode the wave of Stripe and Ramp posting about their own background agent infrastructure. Speaker acquisition for the summit was mostly Lou. I executed the live event.
One unbranded story, multiplied into webinars, a landscape, and a summit, all feeding an inbound motion for sales. That is the principle: the asset is not the deliverable, the funnel it feeds is.
I want to be straight about credit here, because this one was not a solo build. I co-owned the strategy with Lou, drove distribution with the team, and ran the live summit. The site and the landscape were Lou’s. I am putting it on my site because spotting the funnel gap, shaping a category-led campaign, and running it with a team to a real outcome is the work, and most of marketing is team work.
The outcome of that campaign
Between 19 February and 16 June 2026, background-agents.com drew about 145,800 unique human visitors and 186,000 sessions. The homepage launch peaked near 10,000 visitors in a single day on 1 March.
The number I care about most is conversion, not traffic. The summit page converted visitors to registrations at 12.2%, for 3,067 distinct registrants. Traffic is easy to dismiss. A double-digit conversion rate on a summit registration is not.
And the inbound it produced was the right kind. Enterprise names engaged, including BlackRock, Mastercard, Walmart, McKinsey, Microsoft, Citi, UBS, Roche, and Standard Chartered, among many others. To be precise about what that means: these companies came inbound or engaged with the campaign. I am not claiming them as closed deals. The point is the calibre of audience an unbranded, category-led play pulled in, and the inbound motion it built for the sales team.
Outcome
In June 2026, OpenAI announced it had agreed to acquire Ona for its secure agent execution and orchestration platform. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and had not closed at the time of writing.
I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean for my work. A field marketer does not cause an acquisition. The deal belongs to the product, the team, and the traction. What I can say is this: OpenAI agreed to acquire Ona for the enterprise position the company had built, secure agents inside the customer’s own cloud, aimed at regulated industries. That position is the one the rebrand created and the one my field marketing took to market. I built and ran the global field motion that carried Ona to those enterprise buyers. The acquisition is the outcome the whole company reached. I was part of building the conditions for it.
The enterprise traction was real and is on the public record. Reporting at the time of the deal put Ona’s enterprise agent usage up many times over the year, with customers including a major US bank, European pharmaceutical companies, and Asian sovereign wealth funds. Those are the exact regulated buyers the top-down motion was built to reach.
Artifacts
To assemble: event formats and decks from the dual-motion plan, website work and sample PRs, the pipeline reporting model, and the background agents campaign assets once that section is written. Redact anything commercially sensitive before publishing.
What this proves
I get hired to build the revenue engine that does not exist yet, and I build it even when the company is changing shape around me. First field marketer, global remit, $10M in pipeline through a rebrand and an ICP shift, at a company that went on to agree an acquisition by OpenAI for the enterprise position I helped take to market.