Quora is back at it, raising funding for the first time in nearly seven years. Q&A site found $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which will be used to power the development of Poe, Quora’s AI chat platform.
What makes Quora’s AI chatbots different from the rest of the pack? Quora is trying to develop its own subset of the creator economy based on AI chatbots. So instead of a creator living off of YouTube ad revenue, they can try to pay the bills by creating interesting AI bots.
“We expect most of the funding to be used to pay bot creators on the platform through our recently launched creator monetization program,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote in a statement.
In October, Quora launched this creator monetization program for Poe, which allows people who create bots or prompts in Poe to monetize. Even developers who integrate bots with Poe AI can make money.
Quora bets big on creators, but this big fundraiser allows the company to attract talented developers to Poe with the promise of financial compensation. In addition, Poe brings together a wide range of text and image AI models such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama and more, which gives creators a huge playground of tools to access.
When Quora last raised VC funding in 2017, the company was valued at around $1.8 billion. But Quora’s latest raise values the company at just $500 million, a steep drop from its previous raise.
“Over the past two years, the market has changed substantially, driven by rising interest rates and higher capital costs,” D’Angelo wrote. “This means our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are pleased to finally qualify in this new market.”
However, since Poe launched about a year ago, Quora has been picking up some steam. D’Angelo also shared that Quora had its highest usage week ever last week and that the platform has over 400 million monthly unique visitors.
“Excluding Poe, Quora is cash flow positive, so all of this new funding will be used in Poe,” D’Angelo said.
According to TechCrunch data seen by Apptopia in October, Poe’s mobile app was downloaded more than 250,000 times in February, the first month it was open to the public. As of October, Poe has seen over 18.4 million installs and grown to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
“Already, Poe is showing signs of increasing returns to scale,” a16z contributor David George wrote in a suspension. “Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 biggest properties related to creating AI, and creators have built 1M+ bots on Poe’s platform.”
