Sonder founder folds his young AI travel agent Odessia into OpenAI
OpenAI has acquired Odessia, the AI travel agent built by Francis Davidson. The terms were not disclosed, and the deal appears to be an acqui-hire. Odessia was about one year old. It had raised a six million dollar pre-seed round led by Sequoia and launched its product roughly five months before the deal. Davidson now works at OpenAI on travel, and the Odessia tool has been shut down.
Francis Davidson founded Sonder as a college student in 2014 and built it into a unicorn with 143 million dollars in revenue. Then a SPAC raised too little money and a partnership with Marriott fell through, and Sonder went bankrupt. Odessia helped early users plan millions of dollars of travel but closed within months of launch. Its product was switched off as its founder moved inside OpenAI.
Source: TechCrunch Startups · November 10, 2026