It’s with great excitement that I am finally able to share the news that Fora has acquired Legends, an innovative, award-winning AI-powered data platform founded by Stephanie Daniel and Shaina Shiwarsky that transforms zero-party data into rich insights to enable advisors to better serve their clients. Fora will integrate the Legends technology directly into our core platform, and Stephanie and Shaina will join Fora to continue building alongside our growing team at Fora HQ.
This milestone represents a major step forward in our efforts to build the most advisor-, client-, and supplier-centric travel platform in the industry. From day one, Fora’s goal has been to empower meaningful, sustainable, and fun work for travel entrepreneurs. This acquisition allows us to accelerate that commitment, providing our community with even more sophisticated tools, tech, and support to thrive in this age of AI.
I first met Stephanie and Shaina two years ago and was so excited by what they showed me, I knew we needed to find a way to partner with them to bring their solution to our platform. Their approach was ingenious—leveraging powerful analytics on top of the metadata and digital artifacts of our busy lives (our “zero-party data”) to create a unique profile of our travel preferences, past travel activity, and planned future travel—extracting the human story from the bits and bytes.
I could easily envision multiple uses for the technology: personalizing supplier recommendations for a specific client vibe, creating a personalized distribution channel of relevant deals and offers for each client, more efficiently matching new client leads from our $1m/week client lead program, and more. Yet at the time of our first meeting, the Fora Advisor Portal was just beginning to take shape and was not ready to integrate the advanced Legends technology.
And so began an ongoing dialog between Stephanie, Shaina, and me about how their technology, their unique approach to consented zero-party data, and the nearly emerging AI technology would power travel advisors. During this time, Shaina herself became a Fora advisor, learning about the work and the specific needs of a travel advisor firsthand. I would leave each of our conversations with a rush of excitement about the possible things we could build, tempered only by the reality of our backlog full of other competing engineering priorities.
Which brings us to today. After realizing on both sides that building together on the same team could be a lot more rewarding than through a customer/vendor relationship, we were able to convince Stephanie and Shaina to continue their entrepreneurial journey together with ours. Shaina will join Fora as a VP Product focused on CRM, personalization, marketing automation, and data products. Stephanie will join Fora as GM Legends and VP, Strategic Initiatives, continuing to explore innovative uses for the Legends technology to drive more value for our advisors and partners.
If you’re a Fora Advisor, you’ll learn more about plans for the next version of our CRM with integrated Legends technology at Live Forum 2025, our advisor/supplier conference in New York in October. (You can still get tickets here.) If you’re a travel partner, we are happy to talk more about distribution, personalization, and how the Legends technology could be leveraged for you.
Much, much more to come! Happy booking.
(A version of this was published on LinkedIn here.)
