The company was founded in 2006 by Steve Subar and Gernot Heiser as a spinout from NICTA.

Most notable and visible is the company's design win at Motorola for the Evoke QA4 messaging phone, the first phone which employs virtualization to support two concurrent operating systems (Linux and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW)) on one processor core.

OK Labs technology is derived from the L4 microkernel which originated in the early 1990s at German research Lab GMD, further developed at IBM Watson Research Center, the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, the University of New South Wales and NICTA in Australia.

OK Labs technology continues to benefit from ties to academia and research projects, to NICTA, and to the global open-source community.

In February 2014, Cog Systems was founded by former Open Kernel Labs staff and continued OKL4 development in Sydney.