Francis Davidson, the founder of Odessia, says OpenAI has acquired the AI travel company, and that he will join OpenAI to focus on the future of travel. The announcement is in a post on his X account. Odessia’s website and the company’s official account have since confirmed the deal. OpenAI has not published a matching newsroom post, and neither side has disclosed terms.
As part of the transition, the website says the Odessia service is no longer available. People with existing bookings or travel plans are directed to [email protected].
What Davidson says about the company
Davidson writes that he founded Odessia less than a year ago, with the aim of shipping an AI travel agent that could plan and book trips. In the same post, he says “over $60M/year of travel was planned by Odessia over the past summer by tens of thousands of early adopters.” Those figures are his, and they haven’t been independently checked here. He thanks his team, Sequoia, other backers, and travel-industry partners, and says there will be more to share later about “the shape of the future.”
He previously founded the accommodation company Sonder. The longer post is largely an account of how he says Odessia was built with AI coding and business agents, including claims about large productivity gains. Those are his descriptions of internal practice, not figures OpenAI has confirmed.
The official company post uses the same line as the website: the team started Odessia “to reinvent travel,” and the acquisition is “an exciting next chapter for that mission.” It doesn’t say whether the product will return inside ChatGPT or another OpenAI service, or how existing customer data will be handled beyond the support address.
This is a separate deal from OpenAI’s recent agreement to acquire Pierre, the company behind Code Storage and tools used in Codex.
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