OpenAI has hired Francis Davidson, the founder of the AI travel agent Odessia, according to a post from Davidson announcing the deal. Davidson said he is now working at OpenAI and will help the lab with the future of travel. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire. The company said it is thrilled to welcome Davidson, describing him as a proven founder who has built multiple businesses to help people travel.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the deal appears to be an acqui-hire. Odessia was a year-old startup that raised a $6 million pre-seed round led by Sequoia and launched its AI travel agent around five months ago. Davidson said the tool had helped early adopters plan millions of dollars worth of travel. The product has already been shut down.
Davidson's announcement centered on how he built Odessia by directing teams of AI agents. OpenAI has not announced any new travel-specific products or plans following the hire. The lab does count Booking.com, Expedia, and KAYAK among its customers or partners. Travel is also one of the main areas where people use personal AI assistants, and OpenAI mentioned travel as a potential use when it launched its ChatGPT agent in July 2025.
An OpenAI spokesperson said travel is one of the topics chatbot users frequently ask about, and that 1.2 billion people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks including planning a trip. The spokesperson said the company sees a real opportunity to make those experiences more useful. The spokesperson did not have more to share about plans for travel-related products.
Davidson is well known in the travel industry for founding Sonder as a college student in 2014. The company focused on short-term leasing of upscale apartments in major cities worldwide, and Davidson built it into a unicorn with $143 million in revenues. The pandemic badly hurt Sonder, and it later went public via a SPAC but did not raise as much money as it needed, Davidson said in a post announcing his resignation as CEO in June 2025.
After a key partnership with Marriott fell through, Sonder went into bankruptcy and wound down. A bankruptcy trustee sold Sonder's name, trademarks, and website domain in 2026 to TravelAI, and that website now operates as a curated guide to the kind of travel rental properties Sonder was once known for. While Sonder was not ultimately a success story, Davidson is the kind of battle-scarred founder Silicon Valley often values.
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