AI Push Leads Opendoor to Shut India Operations
The US proptech firm will cut about 250 India roles as it brings operational work closer to American customers and shifts to AI-enabled teams.
Topics
News
- TCS Ties Up With Anthropic to Push Claude Into Enterprise AI
- Karnataka Shortlists 256 Deeptech Startups for ELEVATE NxT Finale
- Reliance-Backed Addverb Eyes $100 Million for Robotics Push
- Anthropic Releases Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
- Meta to Lease First AI Data Center in India From Reliance
- Musk Says Space AI Data Centers Are Within Reach as SpaceX Nears IPO
Image Credit- Chetan Jha/ MIT Sloan Management Review India
US-based real estate technology company Opendoor is shutting its India operations and cutting about 250 jobs as it moves operational work closer to its customers in the United States and increases its use of artificial intelligence.
Chief Executive Officer Kaz Nejatian said the company had begun winding down its India operations as part of its Opendoor 2.0 restructuring plan. The decision affects all of Opendoor’s India-based employees, though a small group will stay temporarily to support the migration of key workstreams.
“When we launched Opendoor 2.0 a few months ago, Opendoor had nearly 250 employees in India,” Nejatian wrote in a memo posted on X. “Over the last few months, some of these jobs have been relocated back to the United States.”
He said the move was not linked to employee performance and that affected workers would receive severance, outplacement services and transition support.
The company said its operating model had changed as it unified systems and built smaller AI-native, customer-facing teams in the US.
Opendoor had built a large India team to handle “manual workflows across fragmented systems,” but now needed operational work to be done in person and closer to customers.
The closure comes less than two years after Opendoor expanded its India footprint. Reuters said the company opened offices in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, while TechCrunch reported that it had nearly 250 employees in India when it opened offices in Chennai and Bengaluru in 2024.
Founded in 2014, Opendoor runs a digital residential real estate platform that allows customers to buy and sell homes online. Its core business, known as iBuying, involves making instant offers to homeowners, buying properties directly and later reselling them.
The restructuring reflects a growing shift taking place across corporate America. While AI is often discussed in terms of productivity gains, companies are increasingly using automation and AI-native workflows to redesign organizational structures, reduce operational complexity and consolidate functions geographically.
Nejatian said Opendoor intends to emerge from the restructuring with a smaller workforce but higher productivity. The company plans to simplify internal operations, reduce the number of software tools and workflows used by employees, build a unified platform for managing home transactions and eliminate manual processes where possible.
The announcement comes as technology companies face mounting pressure to demonstrate that AI investments can translate into measurable efficiency gains.
Backed by investors including Sam Altman, Khosla Ventures, General Atlantic, Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank Vision Fund, Opendoor went public in 2020 through a special purpose acquisition company merger.
