Startup News: AI research and deployment company OpenAI has made its latest investment. The company has said that it is looking to expand into coding as it has made a fresh acquisition.

As the market for coding and developer services continues to grow, Open AI has announced plans to acquire Astral. Astral is a startup that makes Python tools for developers.

The deal, which hasn’t yet closed, will bring Astral’s team into OpenAI’s Codex effort, OpenAI said.

Codex has more than 2 million users, the company said, a number that’s tripled since the start of this year. Astral’s suite of tools will push Codex — which can write software features, fix bugs and run tests — into a broader suite of developer services.

“Astral has always focused on building tools that transform how developers work with Python — helping them ship better software, faster,” Charlie Marsh, the startup’s founder, said in a statement.

Marsh added that the company will continue evolving its open-source tools within OpenAI.

OpenAI is currently in a race with competitors including Anthropic, Microsoft Corp. and startups like Cursor to woo corporate customers using AI as coding assistants. Cursor is currently in talks with investors to raise money at a valuation of $50 billion, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, Anthropic is nearing an annual revenue run rate of $20 billion.

Buying Astral is the latest in a string of purchases for OpenAI. This month, it agreed to buy AI security startup Promptfoo, adding tools to test and secure AI agents before deployment. Late last year, it also bought startups including Software Applications Inc. and Neptune.