TravelAI has acquired the Sonder brand, comprised of the Sonder word mark and associated global trademark registrations and a domain name portfolio, including the Sonder.com domain. TravelAI is the operating name of UpNext Ventures and its subsidiaries.
Notably, the acquisition is limited to Sonder's brand and intellectual property: TravelAI did not acquire Sonder's operating business, including its properties, leases, inventory or staff.
The company is relaunching Sonder.com as a guide to urban stays and as a flagship consumer brand built on the memory infrastructure TravelAI is building for the travel industry.
The former Sonder business was founded in Montreal in 2014 and later listed on Nasdaq. "Sonder earned something rare: a name people remember and a standard of taste they trusted," John Lyotier, co-founder and CEO of TravelAI, said in a statement. "We did not acquire a portfolio of buildings. We acquired the one travel brand whose name already means what we are building with our memory infrastructure. Where the old Sonder's technology once lived in the lock on the door, it now lives in discovery, memory, and AI-enabled personalization."
In November 2025, after Marriott International announced the termination of its partnership with the old Sonder, Sonder's parent company announced a wind-down of operations. In Canada, Sonder Canada and Hospitalité Sonder Canada filed for bankruptcy under Canada's Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. It is from these Canadian entities' estates through their court-supervised bankruptcy that UpNext Ventures Inc. acquired the Canadian estates’ rights and interests in the Sonder trademark portfolio, including the SONDER word mark across more than 50 global trademark registrations as well as more than 70 domain names, including Sonder.com.
Following a review conducted by the Trustee, Ernst & Young with the assistance of its legal counsel, the Trustee determined that the available evidence supported the Canadian Sonder entities asserting rights and interests in the trademarks and domain names that formed part of the sale process, and which had been used across the broader Sonder group.
The Superior Court of Québec (Commercial Division) approved the sale to UpNext Ventures Inc. at a hearing held on July 6, and the transaction closed on July 13.
The transaction was completed with the bankruptcy Trustee of the Canadian estates and does not involve Sonder Holdings Inc. or its securities. TravelAI and UpNext Ventures Inc. are not affiliated with Sonder Holdings.
Name and Strategy
Describing itself as the “Travel Memory Company,” TravelAI aims to help travelers find new destinations, remembering enough about their tastes to make the next trip better than the last. The word "sonder," coined to describe the realization that every passing stranger has a vivid, complex inner life, captures that idea more precisely than any name the company could have created from scratch.
The new Sonder.com is a curated guide rather than a hotel operator, applying an editorial standard to a global pool of apartment-style professionally managed homes, boutique hotels and urban stays selected from TravelAI's distribution partners. The new Sonder curates accommodations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Dubai and most of the world's major urban centers.
A Canadian Brand
TravelAI is a Canadian company, as was Sonder at its beginning. As such, the TravelAI team believes that returning the Sonder brand to Canadian ownership and giving it a second chapter is a “point of pride,” especially as TravelAI itself was formed after parent company UpNext Ventures acquired the assets of Left Technologies in 2021, after the predecessor company went through bankruptcy, a casualty of the 2020 pandemic.
"We launched in the spring of 2021 after the founding team pooled resources and did whatever we could to buy our previous business back. Two months after we restarted, the old Sonder announced its intention to go public at a US$2.2 billion enterprise value," continued Lyotier. "Ever since, we have operated with speed and scale, always profitably, and never raising investment dollars. It is a great outcome and a testament to the hard work the team has done to build the technology and platform to have the small company resurrect the brand of a former industry giant."
"We intend to treat the brand with the respect it deserves: keeping what made it Sonder, and giving it a future. This is a new chapter, written with care, for the one that came before."