OpenAI is playing its old "acqui-hire" game again. On November 11, Francis Davidson, founder of AI travel agent company Odessia, announced that the company has merged into OpenAI and that he has joined as well to help the tech giant figure out the direction of its travel business—a deal widely seen as a classic talent acquisition.
A One-Year-Old Startup Backed by Sequoia
Odessia is barely a year old, yet it raised $6 million (about 40.12 million RMB) in pre-seed funding led by Sequoia Capital. About five months ago, it launched an AI travel agent that helped early users plan trips worth millions of dollars. For OpenAI, Davidson himself is worth more than the one-year-old company’s product—a spokesperson called him an "experienced operator" who has founded several businesses that help people travel.
Travel: A High-Frequency Query for ChatGPT
OpenAI has not announced any new travel product or plan. Its existing partners in the same space are Booking.com, Expedia, and KAYAK. As for whether it will enter the travel product business itself in the future, the spokesperson would not say, only noting that travel is one of the topics users frequently ask ChatGPT about. And that is precisely the other layer of logic behind the acquisition: back in 2014, while he was in college, Davidson founded Sonder, an Airbnb-like high-end apartment short-term rental platform, and he had long been well known in the travel industry. By bringing such a veteran into the fold, OpenAI’s ambitions in travel agents are already hidden in the moves on the board.
