{"id":912965,"date":"2026-11-11T00:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T00:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/912965\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T00:24:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T00:24:11","slug":"openai-acquires-odessia-travel-startup-created-by-sonder-founder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/912965\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI acquires Odessia, travel startup created by Sonder founder"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI has acquired an AI travel agent called Odessia, according to<\/a> Odessia\u2019s founder, Francis Davidson. Davidson says in a post announcing the deal that he\u2019s now working for OpenAI, helping the AI lab with the future of travel.<\/p>\n

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this looks like an acqui-hire. Davidson\u2019s announcement focused largely on how he built his AI travel agent Odessia by directing teams of AI agents. The year-old Odessia raised a $6 million pre-seed round led by Sequoia and launched its AI travel agent around five months ago. Davidson says that it had helped early adopters plan millions of dollars\u2019 worth of travel, but the tool has already been shut down.<\/a><\/p>\n

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch. \u201cWe\u2019re thrilled to welcome Francis to OpenAI. Francis is a proven founder who has built multiple businesses to help people travel, and we\u2019re excited he\u2019s chosen to build with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

However the AI lab has not announced new travel-specific products or plans. It does, however, count such companies as Bookings.com, Expedia, and KAYAK as customers or partners. Travel is also one of the main areas that people are using personal AI assistants to help with. And, back in July 2025, when OpenAI launched its ChatGPT agent<\/a>, it mentioned travel as one of its potential uses. <\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s spokesperson didn\u2019t have more to share on its plans for travel-related products, except to say that travel is one of the areas that chatbot users frequently ask about. \u201c1.2 billion people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks \u2014 from understanding their health, figuring out what to make for dinner, building a budget, and even planning a trip. We see a real opportunity to make these experiences even more useful,\u201d the spokesperson said.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Acquiring Odessia is interesting for another reason. Davidson is well known in the travel industry after he founded a travel startup called Sonder as a college student in 2014. It was sort of like Airbnb, but it focused on short-term leasing of upscale apartments in major cities worldwide. The pandemic badly hurt it, and as it climbed out of that rut, it went public via a SPAC but didn\u2019t raise as much money as it needed, Davidson later said in a post announcing<\/a> his resignation as CEO in June 2025.<\/p>\n

When a key partnership with Marriott fell through<\/a>, the company went into bankruptcy and wound down. The bankruptcy trustee sold Sonder\u2019s name, trademarks, and website domain in 2026 to TravelAI, and that website operates as a curated guide to the kind of travel rental properties that Sonder was once known for. Prior to its downfall, Davidson had built Sonder into a unicorn with $143 million in revenues. While Sonder was not, ultimately, a success story, Davidson is the kind of battle-scarred founder that Silicon Valley often values.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019ll have to wait and see what OpenAI has in store now with travel, now that he\u2019s joined the company.<\/p>\n

Note: This story was updated with OpenAI\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has acquired an AI travel agent called Odessia, according to Odessia\u2019s founder, Francis Davidson. Davidson says in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":912966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74,2427],"class_list":["post-912965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}