Quora is making its way back into the funding game after a long hiatus of nearly seven years. The online platform for questions and answers has successfully raised $75 million from the company Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The funds will be utilized to support the growth of Quora’s AI chat platform, known as Poe.
What sets Quora’s AI chatbots apart from the others?
Unlike other AI chatbots, Quora is focused on creating a unique subset of the creator economy through its platform. Instead of relying on ad revenue from YouTube, creators can now make a living by developing and building innovative AI bots.
“We anticipate using the majority of the raised funds to compensate creators of bots on Poe through our recently launched monetization program for creators,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo stated in a press release.
In October, Quora introduced a program for monetizing Poe, allowing creators to generate revenue from their bots and prompts on the platform. Developers who integrate bots with Poe’s AI are also eligible for earnings.
By betting big on creators, Quora aims to attract top talent to Poe by promising financial compensation. Additionally, Poe has a wide selection of text and image AI models such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others. This provides creators with a vast array of tools to explore and utilize.
When Quora last received venture capital funding in 2017, the company had a valuation of approximately $1.8 billion. However, with this funding round, Quora’s valuation has dropped significantly to just $500 million.
“Over the past two years, the market has experienced significant changes due to increasing interest rates and a higher cost of capital,” D’Angelo explained. “This means our valuation has decreased from its previous peak, but we are pleased to now be aligned with this new market.
In the past year since Poe’s launch, Quora has gained momentum. D’Angelo shared that last week, the platform had its highest usage to date, with over 400 million unique monthly visitors.
“Excluding Poe, Quora is currently generating positive cash flow, so all of the new funding will be dedicated to Poe,” D’Angelo added.
According to data from Apptopia observed by TechCrunch in October, Poe’s mobile app was downloaded over 250,000 times in February – its first month open to the public. In total, Poe saw over 18.4 million installations and grew to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
“Already, Poe is showing signs of exponential growth,” wrote a16z partner David George in a blog post. “Presently, Poe is one of the top five largest generative AI-related platforms, with over 1 million bots created by creators.”
