Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian shut down the company's entire India operation less than two years after opening offices in Chennai and Bengaluru. The San Francisco home-buying platform employed nearly 250 people there to handle manual workflows across fragmented systems.
When Opendoor opened its India offices in 2024, it staffed up aggressively. Now the operation is closed. According to TechCrunch, Nejatian cited a shift toward "smaller AI-native teams" and bringing operational work back to the U.S. as the reason for the pullback.
India is home to over 2,100 Global Capability Centers—dedicated offshore units handling everything from IT to R&D—employing 2.36 million people and generating nearly $100 billion annually. The Opendoor closure raised questions about that sector's resilience.
Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, said: "As manual work gets replaced by AI, a lot of jobs will be lost in India." Keshav Lohia at Emergent Ventures called it a "watershed moment for AI-driven operations."
Opendoor has been cutting staff across the board. The company employed 1,042 people globally by year-end—down from 1,470 the year before. Its non-U.S. workforce fell to 184 employees, compared with 342 in 2024. The housing market collapse hit online home-buying platforms hard.
The timing and framing of the decision drew attention in tech circles. Opendoor's exit raised questions about whether this was an isolated case or a sign of broader shifts in how Silicon Valley uses offshore labor.
