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Opendoor Shuts Down Its India Operations to Replace Them With AI-Native Teams in the US

"As we've unified systems and hired small AI-native customer-facing teams throughout the US, we need this work to be done in person and close to our customers."

By Sachin Mohan
Opendoor Shuts Down Its India Operations to Replace Them With AI-Native Teams in the US
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In 30 secondsKey takeaways
  1. 01Opendoor shuts down its India operations, laying off 250 employees in Chennai and Bengaluru.
  2. 02Replace offshore teams with AI-native, customer-facing teams based in the United States.
  3. 03Shift aims to unify systems and enhance operational efficiency through AI-driven models.
Show all 5Show less
  1. 04Decision aligns with Opendoor 2.0 initiative to simplify workflows and reduce manual processes.
  2. 05CEO emphasizes the need for in-person operations to better connect with customers.

Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian announced on June 11, 2026 that the company is shutting down its India operations entirely, laying off approximately 250 employees across Chennai and Bengaluru and replacing the offshore team with small, AI-native customer-facing teams based in the United States.

The announcement was made via an employee memo and a post on X, where Nejatian framed the decision in terms that connect it directly to the company's AI strategy rather than to cost reduction alone.

"For years Opendoor built a large team in India to handle manual workflows across fragmented systems," he wrote. "As we've unified these systems and have hired small AI-native customer-facing teams throughout the US, we need all this operational work to be done in person and close to our customers."

Opendoor is not simply moving work onshore. It is replacing a large team built to manage manual workflows with a smaller team that operates AI-native systems, a fundamentally different organizational model that requires fewer people to generate the same or greater output.

The Opendoor 2.0 Logic

The India closure is one consequence of Opendoor 2.0, the company's initiative to simplify operations by reducing the number of tools, workflow steps, and manual workarounds that had accumulated across its buying, renovation, and selling operations.

Under the previous model, Opendoor had built separate point solutions for different stages of the home transaction process, each requiring human coordination to bridge the gaps between systems, as per the company.

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Opendoor is replacing that infrastructure with a single platform that tracks a home's entire journey from purchase through renovation to resale, eliminating the manual coordination layer that offshore teams were managing.

Nejatian described the outcome in terms that will be familiar across the enterprise AI landscape: "A much smaller company by headcount, but a much larger company by impact."

A small subset of India-based employees will remain temporarily to complete the transition of key workstreams. The company is providing severance, outplacement services, and other transition resources to affected employees, according to the press release.

Nejatian also posted on X encouraging other companies to consider hiring the affected workers: "If you're hiring and have a presence in India, these are excellent people. Consider this my reference letter and hire them."

The Workforce Trajectory

The India closure is not an isolated event. Opendoor's global headcount has been contracting steadily. The company employed 1,042 people at the end of 2025, down from 1,470 a year earlier, according to TechCrunch citing SEC filings.

Its international workforce fell more sharply in the same period, dropping from 342 to 184 employees. The India closure represents the largest single step in that contraction.

The company's Poland operations are not affected. Nejatian confirmed on X that the Polish team remains "very essential" to Opendoor's plans, indicating that the India decision is a targeted operational restructuring around the specific manual workflow functions that AI has made redundant, rather than a broader withdrawal from international operations.