After a hiatus of almost seven years, Quora is once again seeking financial backing. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested $75 million in the Q&A website, which will go toward expanding Quora’s artificial intelligence conversation platform, Poe.
How are Quora’s AI chatbots unique compared to others? With the use of artificial intelligence chatbots, Quora is attempting to build its own segment of the creator economy. This means that creators can try to make ends meet by creating entertaining AI bots rather than relying on YouTube ad revenue.
According to Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, “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”.
Poe creators can now earn money through Quora’s creator monetization scheme, which was launched in October. Anyone can make money if they build bots that work with the Poe AI. Quora is putting a lot of money on creators, but with this massive fundraising, they can get skilled devs to Poe by offering them financial incentives.
Additionally, Poe compiles a diverse set of artificial intelligence models for text and images, including ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and many more, providing developers with a vast array of tools to work with.
Quora was valued at approximately $1.8 billion when it last sought venture capital funding in 2017. A significant drop from its prior financing, Quora is now valued at a meager $500 million in its most recent round of funding.
D’Angelo stated that due to increasing interest rates and the cost of financing, the market has seen significant changes in the past two years. “We are pleased to have finally gained access to this new market, even though this indicates that our valuation is lower than our previous peak.”
But, Quora has been gaining traction since Poe’s introduction approximately a year ago. Additionally, D’Angelo mentioned that last week Quora experienced its most popular week ever and that the platform receives more than 400 million unique visits every month.
“Taking Poe out of the equation, Quora is cash flow positive. Therefore, all of this additional funding will go toward Poe,” D’Angelo stated. In February, the first month it was available to the public, Poe’s mobile app had over 250,000 downloads, according to statistics TechCrunch received from Apptopia in October.
With 18.4 million installs by October, Poe reached approximately 1.22 million active users per month. Poe is already exhibiting rising returns to scale, according to a blog post by a16z partner David George. One million bots and counting have been produced on the Poe platform, which is among the top five generative AI-related products.
If you enjoyed this tech post, you might also be interested in: