Opendoor is shutting down its India operations less than two years after opening offices there.
The San Francisco-based online home-buying platform said in an announcement CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where its customers are, and a shift toward smaller, AI-native teams, and the explanation quickly sparked debate across Silicon Valley about whether AI is changing the cost model for offshore work.
“This is not an isolated restructuring,” Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, said.
India has evolved beyond routine outsourcing into the world’s largest Global Capability Center market, with more than 2,100 centers employing about 2.36 million people and generating nearly $100 billion in annual revenue.
Opendoor had nearly 250 employees in India when it opened offices in Chennai and Bengaluru in 2024 to handle manual workflows across fragmented systems.
Securities filings show Opendoor employed 1,042 people globally at the end of last year, compared with 1,470 a year earlier, and its non-U.S. workforce declined to 184 employees at the end of last year from 342 at the end of 2024.
Investors and outsourcing analysts framed Nejatian’s language as an early signal that AI-driven automation could cut demand for labour-intensive services and change how companies structure operations.
For now, Opendoor’s India exit sits alongside broader workforce reductions at the company, making it difficult to parse how much of the move is specific to AI versus its wider cost cutting.
