OpenAI has bought Odessia, a year-old startup that built an AI travel agent, and its founder Francis Davidson now works at OpenAI. TechCrunch reported the deal on 10 November, drawing on Davidson’s own announcement and a confirmation from an OpenAI spokesperson. Terms were not disclosed. TechCrunch says it looks like an acqui-hire, and the Odessia product is already offline.
Odessia was backed by $6 million in pre-seed money, with Sequoia leading, and its agent reached the market roughly five months back. Davidson says early users planned millions of dollars’ worth of trips with it. He is better known for Sonder, the short-term apartment rental company he started in 2014, which ended in bankruptcy.
OpenAI has not announced a travel product. Booking.com, Expedia, and KAYAK already work with it as customers or partners, and it says 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week, some of them to plan trips.
Anyone building a booking product on OpenAI’s platform should know that OpenAI has just hired a founder to think about the same market.
Reported by TechCrunch on 10 November 2026.
