AI-powered travel agency Fora hits unicorn status, raises $60M

Travel agency Fora announced a $60 million Series D round led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, valuing the company at $1 billion. 

Fora, founded in 2021, is a two-part platform: it lets people easily become travel agents by providing the infrastructure to support client communication and travel planning; it also lets users find and communicate with advisors as they plan trips for occasions like honeymoons or family trips, to destinations like Costa Rica or Thailand. Other investors in this latest round include Insight Partners and Thrive Capital. The company has raised $138.5 million in funding to date, it said. 

Part of the fresh capital will go toward expanding Fora’s AI assistant, Via, which helps travel agents on its platform with tedious administrative tasks such as research and itinerary building. The hope is that the human travel agents who use the platform can instead spend more time building client relations, and that using Fora’s AI will help human productivity rather than attempt to replace it. 

Flora said that since its launch, agents on the platform have booked over $3 billion worth of travel, with a majority of its agent users being new to travel advising. The company also hopes to use the money to hire and grow in other travel categories, such as cruises and flights.