Fora, a platform that lets ordinary people become travel agents and gives travellers a way to find them, has raised a $60m Series D at a $1bn valuation led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures. It has 15,000+ advisors (97% new to the profession) who have booked over $3bn in travel, an accelerating curve. Fora is spending the money on Via, an embedded AI assistant that handles admin so advisors focus on clients, an explicit augment-not-replace bet in a category the internet and AI were supposed to kill.

Travel agents were supposed to be an early casualty of the internet, and then of AI. A company built entirely on human travel agents has instead become a unicorn, according to Fora’s announcement.

Fora has raised $60m in a Series D at a $1bn post-money valuation. The round was led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, taking total funding to $138.5m.

The backing goes beyond the usual venture names. Returning investors Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital were joined by new backers, including PLUS Capital, whose artist and athlete collective features Amy Schumer.

The whole thing runs against a decade of received wisdom. The middleman was supposed to disappear, not raise at a billion dollars.

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What Fora actually is

Founded in 2021, Fora is a two-sided platform. It gives ordinary people the infrastructure to become travel agents, and lets travellers find those agents to plan honeymoons, safaris, or family trips.

The scale is the striking part. Fora has more than 15,000 active advisors, and 97% of them are new to the profession, including former physicians, lawyers, traders, and retirees.

The range of businesses on it is wide. Some advise for a bit of supplemental income, while others book more than $10m of travel a year.

The bookings curve is steep. Agents have booked over $3bn in travel, and while the first billion took three years, the second took eight months and the third just five.

The AI is the back office, not the agent

Here is the interesting bet. Fora is pouring the new money into Via, an embedded AI assistant currently in beta with its top advisors.

Via handles the drudgery, meaning destination research, supplier knowledge, itineraries, and proposal generation. The pitch is that it removes the admin so a human can spend more time on the client.

Co-founder Evan Frank framed AI as raising the ceiling rather than replacing the human. Expertise, relationships, and taste are the hardest things to replicate, he argued, and they matter more as AI absorbs the operational layer.

This is the augment-not-replace thesis made into a business model. It is also the same logic as the finance teams pairing humans with AI rather than firing them.

Why the bet is plausible

The counterintuitive part is that demand for the human is rising, not falling. LinkedIn ranked travel advisor the fifth-fastest-growing job in the US in 2025.

There is a logic to it. As booking options multiply into an overwhelming mess of sites, fares, and AI slop, a trusted human who has actually been to the place becomes more valuable, not less.

Fora’s answer to the AI era is to make that human cheaper to become and more productive once they are. Even Sam Altman has argued an AI jobs apocalypse is unlikely, and this is what the optimistic version looks like in practice.

The caveats worth keeping

The framing is Fora’s own, and it is a company raising money. Its investors echo it, with Tactile Ventures’ Brian O’Malley claiming Fora is growing faster than any other company in AI travel.

That kind of claim has not been tested against a downturn or a genuinely capable autonomous booking agent. Both are plausible within the life of this funding round.

Those agents are coming, with Trip.com, Expedia, and a wave of startups building AI that plans and books a whole trip with no human involved. If that works well enough, Fora’s advisors compete with software, not just with other agents.

The valuation also sits inside a frothy market where AI has minted unicorns at speed, most of them developer tools like Emergent rather than consumer-services plays. A travel-agent platform reaching a billion dollars is a genuine outlier in that crowd.

Why it matters beyond travel

Fora is a test case for a specific proposition. That the winning move in some industries is not to automate the human away, but to arm them and take a cut.

It cuts against the grain of a year defined by AI-driven layoffs and the people left behind. Here the same technology is being used to create a new class of small-business owner rather than to eliminate one.

Fora calls this defining a new category of entrepreneurs, which is marketing, but the underlying claim is real enough. The new money will fund Via, new markets, and a push into cruises, flights, and enterprise.

Whether the bet holds depends on whether the human genuinely adds something the machine cannot. For now, Fora has raised a billion dollars on the wager that taste, trust, and having actually been to Costa Rica still count for something.