A new chapter for Sonder: TravelAI acquires trademarks and domain names, relaunching Sonder.com as an AI-enabled brand for boutique hotels and urban accommodations
TravelAI, the Travel Memory Company, today announced that it 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 Inc. and its subsidiaries. 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 brand relaunches Sonder.com as a curated guide to the world’s best urban stays, and as a flagship consumer brand built on the memory infrastructure TravelAI is building for the travel industry.
For more than a decade, the old Sonder was a trusted name in design-led urban travel, offering high-end apartment-style and boutique hotel stays in neighborhoods travelers most wanted to experience. Founded in Montreal in 2014 and later listed on Nasdaq (NASDAQ: SOND), Sonder grew into one of the most recognized names in its category.
“Sonder earned something rare: a name people remember and a standard of taste they trusted,” said John Lyotier, co-founder and CEO of TravelAI. “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 (NASDAQ: MAR) announced the termination of its partnership with the old Sonder, Sonder’s parent company announced a wind-down of operations. In Canada, Sonder Canada Inc. and Hospitalité Sonder Canada Inc. 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 Inc., 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, 2026, and the transaction closed on July 13, 2026.
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 Inc. (OTC: SONDQ).
A name that is the strategy
TravelAI is the Travel Memory Company, with a mission it describes as “Better Memories for All”, helping travelers find the place that is genuinely right for them, and 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, not a hotel operator. Rather than presenting travelers with endless, undifferentiated listings, Sonder applies a consistent editorial standard to a global pool of apartment-style professionally-managed homes, the best boutique hotels, and urban stays drawn from TravelAI’s distribution partners. Travelers see a considered selection chosen for design, neighborhood, and quality. 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, brought home
TravelAI is a Canadian company, as was Sonder at its beginning. As such, returning the Sonder brand to Canadian ownership and giving it a second chapter is a point of pride for the team, especially given that TravelAI itself was formed after parent company UpNext Ventures acquired the assets of Left Technologies Inc. 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.”
Said Lyotier, “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.”
Building the memory infrastructure for travel
Sonder joins a growing family of travel brands TravelAI has acquired and revitalized in recent years, including Casai, Smartours, and OwnerDirect.
In parallel to growing its portfolio of brands, TravelAI is developing AI infrastructure that will take the portfolio to a new level. Through Traveler.md (TravelAI’s traveler-owned memory file), it has created a connective layer that lets a traveler’s tastes, preferences, and history be remembered and carried from one trip, brand, and booking to the next, rather than starting from zero every time. The technology, which was launched in June, is currently in public beta and is already being used to make trips more personal.
Sonder.com, which is now live today, will continue to evolve quickly as the company’s proprietary AI platform develops, offering new options and experiences for travelers.
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About TravelAI
TravelAI is the Travel Memory Company, providing AI travel infrastructure in service of creating better travel for one billion travelers by 2030. A business of UpNext Ventures Inc., founder-owned and profitable since inception, TravelAI applies AI across an owned-distribution network of more than 530 travel brands, serving more than 50 million travelers annually, in six languages and across 200 countries. The company creates AI infrastructure for the travel industry, and has recently launched Traveler.md, a traveler-owned portable memory layer that lets any service read traveler preferences and trips with permission, and Tripp, a multimodal AI agent helping to create better memories for all. Learn more at TravelAI.com.
About Sonder
Sonder is a curated guide to the world’s best urban stays: design-led apartment-style homes and the best boutique hotels and accommodations in the neighborhoods travelers love most. Now part of TravelAI, Sonder pairs a decade of brand heritage with AI technologies and a new standard of curation. Bookings are fulfilled by TravelAI’s partners.
