OpenAI Group PBC today announced plans to acquire Astral Software Inc., a startup with a set of widely used Python development tools. 

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Astral’s development tools are written in Rust, a programming language that is both more complicated and significantly faster than Python. As a result, the startup says that its software is 10 to 100 times more performant than competing products. That speed and certain other features have helped Astral build an installed base of several million developers.

The company’s flagship tool, uv, is a Python package manager. It enables developers to download open-source Python code components, or packages, and integrate them into their software projects. A built-in cache saves code components after the initial installation. That removes the need for developers to re-download the same package multiple times, which saves time. 

Software teams can also use uv to ease certain related tasks. The software automates simple, repetitive chores such as viewing what packages an application uses and upgrading its Python language implementation to the latest version.

Astral’s two other open-source tools are designed to help developers detect code quality issues. 

The first tool, Ruff, is a linter, a type of debugger optimized to spot small programming mistakes. For example, it can detect when a piece of code doesn’t adhere to a company’s style or formatting best practices. Ruff generates remediation suggestions for the issues that it finds. 

Astral offers the tool alongside ty, an even more specialized debugging tool. When developers write a Python code snippet that processes data, they must add in a keyword that specifies what type of data is being processed. Software teams can use ty to find code snippets in which the keyword is inaccurate. Such inconsistencies can lead to application errors if they’re left addressed.

OpenAI said today Astra’s open-source tools will continue to be maintained following the acquisition. The ChatGPT developer plans to integrate them with its Codex programming assistant. The Astral team is joining OpenAI to support the development effort.

Besides enhancing Codex, the acquisition may also help the company create a new revenue stream. Astra’s website indicates that it’s working on a paid product called pyx. It’s a cloud-based Python package registry, a kind of app store that software teams can use to store application building blocks. The service lends itself to hosting, among other projects, pre-configured versions of artificial intelligence frameworks such as PyTorch. 

“After joining the Codex team, we’ll continue building our open source tools, explore ways they can work more seamlessly with Codex, and expand our reach to think more broadly about the future of software development,” Astral founder and Chief Executive Officer Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post.

The deal comes four months after OpenAI rival Anthropic PBC also acquired a developer tooling startup. San Francisco-based Bun created an open-source platform for building and testing JavaScript applications. Additionally, the software includes a package manager with similar features as Astral’s uv. Anthropic stated at the time of the acquisition that Bun would help enhance Claude Codex. 

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