Post by Jake Peters

While it’s much more exciting to write about a new product release (something I’ll be doing a lot of in the coming weeks), today it’s a pleasure to announce Fora Travel’s $60m Series D at a $1bn valuation, led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures (with our longtime investor Brian O'Malley). This round includes participation from all our existing lead investors (Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, Heartcore Capital) and some new investors PLUS Capital, BlackPines Capital Partners, and Tribeca Venture Partners. I encourage you to read what my co-founder Evan Frank wrote about our milestone on behalf of Henley Vazquez and me below or here: https://lnkd.in/eu6SXVk8 In the past 5 years, we’ve focused on building technology, community programming, training, marketing tools, an expanded preferred partner network, an industry-best commission collection apparatus, and more to enable over 15,000+ advisors across 140 countries to sell $3bn in travel. 97% of the advisors selling all this travel and creating amazing travel experiences for their clients are new to the industry—which is how we have done our part to make travel advising one of the fastest growing careers in the US (according to LinkedIn). This August we will celebrate our 5th birthday with a party—but more importantly, with a big product launch that includes the general release of Via, our integrated AI assistant, and some major improvements to our hotel booking platform.  These features and the work we do here are not just about selling fancy hotels, luxurious safaris, and exotic cruises—although we do sell a lot of those things. It’s about enabling people to build businesses that provide them with income and meaning in a way that was previously not possible. The heartfelt notes we receive from our advisors about the impact that both big and small features have on their lives motivate every product manager, engineer, designer, and support specialist on our team to keep working harder. There’s a lot of talk about using AI to automate the mundane tasks of travel advising—this is happening, but it’s the low hanging fruit of AI enablement. This funding round will allow us to build tools that do all of that well, but go further: create a way for clients and advisors to co-create travel together; collect and process the collective wisdom of our community to enable advisors to know details about supplier partners and destinations better than before; surface deals to create expanded options for clients, and more.  Our AI efforts are already and will continue to be embedded in our product throughout the stack, from the foundational data layers to our interactive presentation layers, and across our three-sided marketplace with advisors, clients and supplier partners.  If you are interested in building innovative, industry first advancements with us in NYC, check out our jobs here: https://lnkd.in/eR9j2-dV Back to building.