By
Chimamanda U. Martha
March 28th, 2024
The funding boost will accelerate Poe, Quora’s AI chat platform, as it carves a niche in the creator economy, allowing AI bot creators to monetize their efforts.
Quora, the popular questions and answers platform, has successfully raised $75 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), marking its first funding round in nearly seven years. The capital injection will further fuel the expansion of Poe, Quora’s AI chat platform.
Distinguishing itself in the realm of AI chatbots, Quora aims to carve out a unique space in the creator economy by fostering a community of AI bot creators. Instead of traditional revenue streams like YouTube ad earnings, creators on Quora’s platform can now monetize their efforts in building engaging AI bots.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo stated:
“We expect the majority of the funding to be used to pay creators of bots on the platform through our recently-launched creator monetization program.”
This monetization initiative, launched in October for Poe, also empowers individuals crafting bots or prompts on the platform to generate income. Even developers integrating bots with Poe’s AI are eligible for financial compensation.
With this substantial funding round, Quora also aims to attract skilled developers to Poe by offering financial incentives. Poe boasts a diverse array of text and image AI models, including ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others. This rich toolset provides creators with an extensive playground for innovation and content creation.
Quora Secures Funding at $500M Valuation amid Market Shifts
Quora recently closed a funding round that valued the company at $500 million, a substantial decline from its 2017 valuation of approximately $1.8 billion. Quora’s CEO Adam D’Angelo attributed this shift to changing market dynamics influenced by rising interest rates and an increased cost of capital.
D’Angelo acknowledged the impact of market forces on the company’s valuation, stating:
“This means our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are happy to finally be marked to this new market.”
Despite the adjusted valuation, Quora has experienced notable success since the launch of Poe, its AI chat platform, about a year ago. D’Angelo shared that Quora achieved its highest usage week ever recently, with over 400 million monthly unique visitors to the platform.
Quora’s financial resilience comes from the fact that the platform is cash flow positive, excluding Poe. Consequently, the recently secured funding, totaling $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz, will be exclusively move to further develop and enhance Poe.
Poe’s performance metrics indicate promising growth, with over 250,000 downloads in its first month of public availability in February, as reported by Apptopia. By October, Poe had amassed more than 18.4 million installations and garnered nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
a16z partner David George highlighted the increasing returns to scale for Poe, positioning it among the top 5 largest generative AI-related properties. Creators have contributed to this growth by building over 1 million bots on the Poe platform.