OpenAI has acquired Odessia, an AI-powered travel planning startup founded less than a year ago by Francis Davidson, who will join the company to focus on shaping the future of travel. The acquisition follows a period of rapid growth for the startup, which reportedly facilitated more than $60 million in annualized travel planning over the past summer, serving tens of thousands of early adopters.
Davidson announced the acquisition, describing it as the culmination of his ambition to build the market’s leading AI travel agent. He said Odessia demonstrated how artificial intelligence could transform the way people plan and book travel, making it possible to organize extraordinary trips through AI-powered experiences.
The acquisition also marks a new chapter for Davidson, who previously founded Sonder, a hospitality company he grew from its early stages to $600 million in revenue over a decade, with a workforce of more than 1,000 people. However, he explained that his approach to building Odessia was fundamentally different, as the startup was designed from the beginning around the capabilities of the emerging agentic AI era.
In explaining how the company was built, Davidson highlighted its decision to integrate AI agents across virtually every business function, extending their use beyond software development to include strategy, partnerships, design, marketing, customer support, legal operations and finance. According to Davidson, his personal use of AI agents increased 25-fold throughout 2026, reflecting how rapidly the technology became central to the company’s operations.
Rather than treating AI as a supporting tool, Odessia built its operating model around agents capable of executing complex assignments, producing deliverables and accelerating decision-making. The company provided these agents with access to the information and systems required to perform their responsibilities, connecting them to meeting recordings, Slack conversations, emails, Google Drive and other internal software through MCP integrations, command-line interfaces and plugins.
This approach allowed agents to retrieve information from multiple sources, review company presentations, examine customer feedback and access internal records within a single workflow. Odessia also developed shared documentation covering company decisions, strategies and operational knowledge, enabling agents to maintain a consistent understanding of the business and its objectives.
Davidson also highlighted the company’s use of voice instructions to manage AI agents, arguing that voice prompting could be three to four times faster than writing instructions. This allowed employees to communicate ideas naturally, provide context, and correct an agent’s direction as their thinking developed, without spending excessive time preparing detailed prompts.