The genus name is derived from orang bunian, supernatural forest-living beings in Malay folklore, with the suffix -pone from the name of subfamily.

[2] The genus was established by Schmidt & Shattuck (2014) to house the single species Ponera amblyops (at the time a junior synonym Pachycondyla amblyops), which was first described by Emery (1887)[3] from worker specimen from the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

[2] Molecular phylogeny by Schmidt (2013) resolved Buniapone as a sister to the strictly African genus Paltothyreus.

Workers are medium in size (5.5–6.5 mm), orange-colored, and have long and narrow mandibles with seven teeth.

However, Buniapone is more closely related to other species and the similarities are deemed to have evolved through convergent evolution.