AI-powered travel agency Fora achieves unicorn status, raises $60 million | TechCrunch

Brief

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

Forumsfounded in 2021, is a two-part platform: it allows users to easily become travel agents by providing the infrastructure to support customer communication and travel planning; it also allows users to find and connect with advisors when planning 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 new capital will be dedicated to developing Fora’s AI assistant, Via, which helps travel agents on its platform with tedious administrative tasks such as searching and creating itineraries. The hope is that human travel agents using the platform can spend more time building relationships with customers, and that using Fora’s AI will improve human productivity rather than trying to replace it.

Fora said that since its launch, agents on the platform have booked trips worth more than $3 billion, with the majority of its agent users new to travel consulting. The company also hopes to use the money to hire and expand into other travel categories, such as cruises and flights.

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Fora’s name in the last paragraph.

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