Fora, the platform that lets independent travel advisors run their own booking businesses, announced a $60 million Series D on July 16 led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, pushing its valuation to $1 billion and making it travel tech's newest unicorn.

What was announced

The round brings Fora's total funding to $138.5 million since it was founded in 2021, with existing backers Thrive Capital, Insight Partners and Tribeca Venture Partners returning alongside new investors. Fora is a two-sided marketplace: it gives people the infrastructure to become independent travel advisors — client communication tools, supplier access and commission handling — while also connecting travelers directly to those advisors for trip planning. The company says its more than 15,000 active advisors, 97% of whom are new to the travel industry, have collectively booked over $3 billion in travel.

The AI agent behind the raise

A core piece of the new round's use of funds is expanding Via, Fora's AI assistant for advisors. Via handles time-consuming administrative work — destination research, supplier knowledge lookups, drafting client itineraries and generating proposals — so that human advisors can spend more time on client relationships and sales rather than research and paperwork. Fora is building Via into an AI operating layer across the whole platform rather than a bolt-on chatbot, reflecting a broader shift in the round: capital earmarked specifically for deepening agentic tooling rather than just marketing or advisor acquisition.

Why it matters

Fora's raise is a concrete example of AI agents being embedded inside a two-sided marketplace to make a human workforce more productive rather than replacing it outright — advisors stay the client-facing product, while Via absorbs the repetitive research and drafting work behind each booking. It also signals continued investor appetite for vertical AI-agent tooling in categories like travel that sit outside the usual coding- and enterprise-software-heavy agent funding headlines, at a moment when Fora says its pace of bookings has been accelerating: three years to its first billion dollars in lifetime bookings, eight months to the second, and five months to the third.