From Virginia farm to $1B unicorn: How Henley Vazquez raised $60M by rebuilding travel for everyone the industry wouldn't let in. July 17, 2026 * Fora closes $60 million Series D at a $1 billion post-money valuation, led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, with Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital returning. * The platform has crossed $3 billion in lifetime bookings - reaching the third billion in just 5 months, versus 3 years for the first. * 97% of Fora's 15,000 active advisors had never worked in travel before joining, including former physicians, lawyers, and full-time parents. Henley Vazquez grew up on a 550-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her family didn't travel. She had no connection to the travel industry, no inherited network of hotel relationships, and no obvious path into one of the most gatekept professions in hospitality. What she had was a Princeton degree, a job at Town & Country magazine, and an eye for exactly who the industry was keeping out - and why. Twenty years later, she is the co-founder of Fora, a New York-based platform for independent travel advisors that has just raised $60 million in a Series D at a $1 billion post-money valuation, making it one of the few female-co-founded unicorns in travel tech. The round was led by Forerunner Ventures and Tactile Ventures, with returning backers Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital, alongside new investors including PLUS Capital, BlackPines Capital Partners, and Tribeca Venture Partners. Amy Schumer and other members of PLUS Capital's artist and athlete collective also joined. The industry she decided to break open. After Town & Country, Vazquez joined the founding team of Indagare, a members-only boutique travel company, where she learned the booking platform, the hotel relationships, and the business side of travel advising from the ground up. In 2014, as a mother of two young children, she launched her own Virtuoso travel agency, Passported, focused on young families travelling with kids. At every step she saw the same structural problem: the profession had been designed to exclude people who didn't already belong. High barriers to entry, outdated tools, payment structures that required advisors to work essentially for free during ramp-up, and no flexibility for anyone with a career, children, or a life outside travel. "What I kept coming back to was a mismatch. There were so many people who would have been extraordinary travel advisors, but the industry just wasn't built to welcome them in," said Henley Vazquez, co-founder, Fora. Fora is the answer to that mismatch. Co-founded in 2021 alongside Evan Frank - who previously was one of the co-founders of onefinestay, the luxury home-sharing platform acquired by AccorHotels for approximately $169 million in 2016 and Jake Peters, Fora's co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer, the platform gives people with no travel background the training, supplier relationships, AI tools, and back-office infrastructure to launch their own travel businesses within weeks. A former nurse, corporate lawyer, or retiree can join, get onboarded onto Fora's hotel partnership terms, and start booking commissionable trips using Fora's AI assistant, Via, to draft itineraries rather than doing that work by hand. Who Fora's advisors actually are. The numbers reflect that founding intent precisely. Of Fora's 15,000+ active advisors, 97% had never worked in travel before joining the platform. The base is majority women. Former physicians, lawyers, parents, and retirees make up a significant portion. The platform is headquartered in New York City, and has collectively booked more than $3 billion in travel since 2021 - the third billion taking just 5 months, compared to 3 years for the first. The $60 million Series D brings total funding to $138.5 million. Forerunner has backed Fora since its $5 million seed round in 2021 - Kirsten Green's firm has a track record of picking category-defining consumer brands early, with previous bets including Chime, Faire, and Warby Parker. Tactile Ventures' Brian O'Malley first backed Fora while at Forerunner, then brought it into his new firm's portfolio when he founded Tactile in 2024 - backing the same company twice across 2 different firms. The AI question Fora has to answer. The new capital will fund the expansion of Via beyond its current beta group, new market entry, and deeper investment in cruises, flights, and enterprise travel. It also funds Fora's answer to the most pointed question in travel tech right now: does AI replace the human advisor, or just make them faster? Most of the capital in travel tech is going the other way. Navan went public at a $6.2 billion valuation, building AI-driven software for corporate travel management - not a marketplace for human advisors. O'Malley has framed Fora's answer directly: "Fora has more revenue than all AI travel companies, combined," said Brian O'Malley, founder and managing partner, Tactile Ventures. The online travel market was valued at $713 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow at a 7.4% CAGR through 2035, according to Grand View Research. LinkedIn ranked travel advisor as the fifth-fastest-growing job in the US in 2025 - a data point that sits behind Fora's core thesis. The category gets won by whoever makes 15,000 independent advisors harder to replace - not by whoever removes them. For the woman who grew up on a Virginia farm and spent two decades watching an industry exclude people exactly like her, that is the only bet worth making.

This fall, Sotheby's joins forces with luxury travel company Indagare to design VIP itineraries where fine art, world-class cuisine and insider cultural access meet - whether in a Ferrari factory in Modena or at a private dinner in the Louvre Abu Dhabi.