OpenAI has acquired AI travel startup Odessia, adding another consumer-focused application to its growing portfolio of AI-powered products as the company expands its push into autonomous AI agents.
Francis Davidson, who founded Odessia less than a year ago, announced the acquisition Tuesday in a post on X, saying he would join OpenAI to focus on the future of travel. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Davidson said Odessia helped tens of thousands of early adopters plan more than $60 million in annualized travel over the past summer, arguing that AI-powered tools are making it possible to plan and book complex trips.
Davidson previously founded Sonder Holdings, a hospitality company that operated furnished apartments and boutique hotel-style accommodations. The business grew to $600 million in revenue over a decade and employed more than 1,000 people before eventually running into financial difficulties.
Davidson wrote that the approach at Odessia was radically different, built around the idea that AI agents could handle much of the work traditionally performed by large teams.
"We burned the old playbooks and radicalized ourselves to truly embrace the new agentic era," Davidson wrote.
Building a Company Around AI Agents
In the same post, Davidson described how the startup relied heavily on AI agents across nearly every business function, including strategy, partnerships, design, marketing, customer support, legal and finance.
Davidson said tasks that previously required roughly 40 hours of manual work could sometimes be completed in two hours using frontier AI models and multiple rounds of agent feedback.
Rather than assigning employees individual tasks through traditional roadmaps, Davidson said Odessia encouraged workers to manage multiple agents simultaneously, review their output and make corrections.
The company also deployed agents to monitor daily analytics, investigate production errors, review customer feedback and conduct overnight software tests.
OpenAI's Expanding Acquisition Strategy
The Odessia deal adds to a growing string of acquisitions as OpenAI looks to build out the infrastructure and applications surrounding its AI models.
Just last week, OpenAI announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer Company, a developer-tools startup whose technology already powers features within its Codex platform.
The deal followed several other developer-focused acquisitions. In March, OpenAI announced plans to acquire Astral, the company behind open-source Python development tools uv, Ruff and ty. The company also agreed to acquire Promptfoo, an AI security testing startup whose technology helps businesses identify vulnerabilities in AI applications.
In June, OpenAI announced plans to buy Ona, a developer infrastructure company specializing in secure cloud environments that allow AI agents to work on software projects over extended periods.
Together, the deals point to an effort to build more of the infrastructure surrounding AI-powered work, extending beyond the underlying models themselves.
Odessia represents a different direction for that strategy, bringing OpenAI into AI-powered travel planning and potentially expanding the reach of its agents into consumer services.
Davidson did not disclose how Odessia's technology or product would be integrated into OpenAI's existing offerings, saying the companies would share more details about the future direction of the project later.
