OpenAI has bought Odessia, the AI travel agent Francis Davidson built in under a year

OpenAI has acquired Odessia, according to its founder Francis Davidson and Odessia’s own website. Davidson, the Sonder co-founder, says he started the AI travel agent less than a year ago, and he is joining OpenAI to work on travel. The price was not disclosed, Odessia’s service has already been switched off, and OpenAI has not said what it plans to build.

Davidson announced the deal in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday 10 November. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch, calling him “a proven founder who has built multiple businesses to help people travel.” OpenAI has not published an announcement of its own.

What OpenAI actually bought

Not revenue, according to Skift, which says plainly that OpenAI didn’t buy Odessia for that. The service was free. Skift reports that it opened to the public on 14 October as a concierge people reached by text, after being unveiled in June with a team of eight in San Francisco. That gives it about four weeks of public life before the deal was announced. Davidson’s traction figures (below) cover the summer, so they come from early users before the public launch.

What it did have, according to Skift, was IATA accreditation as a travel agent, which got it access to private hotel rates and perks such as free breakfast and room upgrades. It also had a working agent that could plan and book flights, hotels and itineraries in one conversation. OpenAI already works with Booking.com, Expedia and KAYAK, as TechCrunch notes. Skift’s take is that this deal adds what those partnerships don’t: a team that has built a booking agent end to end.

TechCrunch says the deal “looks like an acqui-hire.” That is the publication’s reading, not a confirmed structure. BetaKit found that most of Odessia’s staff listed on LinkedIn are based in Québec and previously worked at Sonder, and said it is unclear whether they are joining OpenAI. So far only Davidson’s move is confirmed.

Read the numbers carefully

Two figures from Davidson’s post will get repeated, and both need a label.

The first is Odessia’s traction. He wrote that “over $60M/year of travel was planned by Odessia over the past summer by tens of thousands of early adopters.” That is company-reported, and it is travel planned, not travel booked and certainly not Odessia’s revenue. Nobody independent has checked it.

The second is Sonder. Davidson wrote that he took it “from 0 to $600M in revenues.” TechCrunch, in its report on the deal, says he built Sonder into a unicorn “with $143 million in revenues.” Both numbers have come from Davidson. His June 2025 departure post said Sonder reached “$143M annual revenue in 5 years”, and his LinkedIn profile lists “0 to 600M+ annual revenue”. They are both annual revenue, from different years. Sonder’s filings show $142.9 million for 2019, five years after it started, and $602.1 million for 2023. TechCrunch’s figure is the earlier one. Neither should be quoted alone as “Sonder’s revenue” without the year.

How Sonder ended matters for reading this deal. It went public through a SPAC in 2022, signed a licensing deal with Marriott in 2024, and Davidson stepped down as chief executive in June 2025, the week the Marriott integration was completed. TechCrunch reports that the Marriott partnership then fell through and Sonder went into bankruptcy. Seventeen months after leaving Sonder, which collapsed later in 2025, Davidson has sold a new company to OpenAI.

The real subject of Davidson’s post

Most of Davidson’s announcement isn’t about the sale at all. It is a long account of running a company through AI agents, and it is the more interesting part.

He says his own use of agents rose 25 times through 2026, across strategy, partnerships, design, marketing, customer support, legal and finance, not just code. He describes giving agents the same access an employee has (meeting recordings, Slack, email, Drive), dictating prompts by voice because typing was too slow, and turning repeated corrections into reusable skills. His example of the payoff: a task that might take 40 hours by hand took two with agents, “20x productivity gain.” That is his estimate, not a measurement.

He also makes a claim worth arguing with. “The best process is no process,” he wrote. “The ROI on planning and process has cratered.” He describes launching an agent on any idea the moment he had it, with no roadmap or prioritisation, and a team working six or seven days a week.

Our view: the first half of that is believable and matches what Maarten, the Dutch founder in File #004, told Create With. He rebuilt a business he had run on Google Forms for five years using Claude Code. But Maarten’s lesson was the opposite of “no process”: he said the hard part was understanding the process first. Davidson had a decade of running a travel company behind him before he started Odessia. Our guess is that experience did much of the planning he says he skipped. A first-time founder copying the “no process” part without it is likely to ship a lot of things quickly and not know which ones matter.

What to watch

• An OpenAI announcement. The spokesperson told TechCrunch the company had no more to share on travel products, while noting that 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week, including to plan trips. Davidson wrote: “We’ll have more to share on the shape of the future soon.”
• Existing Odessia bookings. Odessia’s website says the service is no longer available and points customers with existing bookings to support@odessia.com.
• Booking.com and Expedia. Nothing announced changes those partnerships. If OpenAI starts booking travel directly, it would put it in competition with companies it currently hosts inside ChatGPT. For now, that is a question, not a plan.

For the background on the company Davidson has joined, see our file on Sam Altman and the company he doesn’t own.

FAQ

How much did OpenAI pay for Odessia? The price has not been disclosed by Davidson, Odessia or OpenAI.

Can I still use Odessia? No. Its website says the service is no longer available as part of the transition.

How much money did Odessia raise? About $6 million, led by Sequoia, according to TechCrunch, BetaKit and Skift. TechCrunch calls it a pre-seed round and Skift calls it seed funding.