Quora is back, raising funds for the first time in almost seven years. The question and answer website got $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and will use it to drive the growth of Poe, Quora's AI chat platform.
What sets Quora AI chatbots apart from the rest? Quora is trying to develop its own subset of the creator economy based on AI chatbots. Instead of a creator making a living off YouTube ad revenue, he can try to pay the bills by creating cool AI robots.
"We expect the majority of the funds 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, allowing those who create bots or posts on Poe to generate income. Even developers who integrate bots with Poe AI can make money.
Quora is betting big on creators, but this big fundraising allows the company to attract talented developers to Poe with the promise of financial compensation. Additionally, Poe adds a wide range of text and image AI models such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama and others, giving creators a huge variety of tools to access.
The last time Quora raised venture capital funding was in 2017, when the company was valued at around $1.800 billion. But Quora's latest raise values the company at just $500 million, a sharp drop from its previous raise.
"Over the past two years, the market has changed substantially, driven by rising interest rates and the higher cost of capital," D'Angelo wrote. "This means our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are pleased to finally be in this new market."
However, since the release of Poe about a year ago, Quora is gaining momentum. D'Angelo also shared that Quora had its highest usage last week and that the platform has more than 400 million monthly unique visitors.
"Excluding Poe, Quora is cash flow positive, so all of these new funds will be spent on Poe," D'Angelo said.
According to data released from Apptopia in October, Poe's mobile app was downloaded more than 250.000 times in February, its first month open to the public. As of October, Poe has recorded more than 18,4 million installs and grown to nearly 1,22 million monthly active users.
“Poe is already showing signs of increasing returns,” a16z partner David George wrote in a entry in your blog. “Currently, Poe is one of the top five generative AI properties related to Artificial Intelligence, and creators have created more than 1 million bots on the Poe platform.”
