OpenAI acquires travel AI startup Odessia from Sonder founder

OpenAI has acquired Odessia, an AI travel agent startup, according to founder Francis Davidson, who says he’s now working at OpenAI on the future of travel. Neither side disclosed terms, and the shape of the announcement — Davidson’s own post focused on how he built Odessia by directing teams of AI agents — reads as an acqui-hire more than a product purchase.

The startup was barely a year old, having closed a $6 million pre-seed round that Sequoia led, and had only brought its AI travel agent to market some five months earlier. Davidson says early adopters used it to plan millions of dollars in travel, though the product has already been shut down. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch, describing Davidson as a repeat founder with a track record of building travel businesses.

OpenAI hasn’t announced any new travel-specific products or plans, though it already counts Booking.com, Expedia and KAYAK as customers or partners, and travel keeps surfacing as one of the things people lean on personal AI assistants for — OpenAI flagged it as a potential use case when it launched the ChatGPT agent in July 2025. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch: “1.2 billion people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks — 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.”

Davidson is a well-known name in travel: he founded Sonder in 2014 as a college student, building an Airbnb-like business around short-term leases of upscale apartments in major cities, and built Sonder into a unicorn that generated $143 million in revenue. The pandemic hit Sonder hard, and after a SPAC listing that raised less than it needed, a collapsed partnership with Marriott pushed the company into bankruptcy; Davidson resigned as CEO in June 2025. In 2026, the firm overseeing Sonder’s bankruptcy sold its name, trademarks and web domain to TravelAI, which now runs the site as a curated guide to the kind of rental properties Sonder once specialized in.

Why it matters

Acqui-hiring a one-year-old travel startup whose own product is already dead is a small deal in dollar terms, but it gives OpenAI a founder who has already tried to rebuild travel software twice — and a signal that travel, an area it has flagged but not yet built for, is moving up its product roadmap.