Quora is back at it, raising funding for the first time in nearly seven years. The question and answer site has been captured $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which will be used to support the growth of Poe, Quora’s AI-powered 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 centered around AI-powered chatbots. So, instead of a creator earning a living from YouTube ad revenue, they can try to pay the bills by creating interesting AI bots.
“We expect the majority of the funding will 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 a creator monetization program for Poe, which allows people who create bots or claim Poe to generate revenue. Even developers who integrate bots with Poe AI are eligible to make money.
Quora is betting big on creators, but this massive fundraising allows the company to lure talented developers to Poe with the promise of financial compensation. Additionally, Poe brings together 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 wealth of tools to access.
When Quora last raised venture capital funding in 2017, the company was valued at about $1.8 billion. But Quora’s latest raise values the company at just $500 million, a sharp decline from the previous raise.
“In the past two years, the market has changed dramatically, driven by rising interest rates and the rising cost of capital,” D’Angelo wrote. “This means that our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are happy that we have finally reached this new market.”
However, since Poe’s launch almost a year ago, Quora has gained some traction. D’Angelo also shared that Quora had its highest usage week ever last week, and that the platform has more than 400 million unique visitors per month.
“With the exception of Poe, Quora is cash flow positive, so all of this new funding will be used at Poe,” D’Angelo said.
According to data seen by TechCrunch from Apptopia in October, Poe’s mobile app was downloaded more than 250,000 times in February, its first month open to the public. During the month of October, Poe saw over 18.4 million installs and grew to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
“Bo is already showing signs of increasing returns at scale,” a16z partner David George wrote in an article. Blog post. “Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 AI production properties, and creators have built over a million bots on the Poe platform.”