Adam D’Angelo, founder and CEO of Quora, announced a significant milestone for the company in a news release on the Quora blog yesterday. Quora has successfully raised $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz to boost the growth of Poe, its AI chat platform. This funding will primarily support the platform’s creator monetization program, rewarding creators who develop bots on Poe.
Poe, which launched nearly a year ago, has quickly gained popularity, amassing millions of users. These users engage with the platform either through its free tier or by subscribing to premium benefits. The platform boasts millions of bots, created both by users through prompting and by developers using the Poe API. D’Angelo expressed enthusiasm about collaborating with David George and the team at a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) to enhance the platform’s offerings for users and creators, aiming to make AI more accessible to the average consumer.
D’Angelo drew a parallel between Poe’s role in AI and the role of web browsers in the early internet, outlining two key goals: to be the premier platform for consumers to chat with various AI products and to provide the simplest way for developers to build AI chat products and reach a mass audience. The vision is to accelerate AI’s mainstream adoption, fostering benefits like increased knowledge access, creative expression democratization, and economic growth.
With the new funding, Quora plans to expedite progress towards these goals and establish a thriving AI creator economy. The focus is on enabling individual developers and businesses to profit through the platform and facilitating smaller AI research groups or companies to reach a broad audience.
D’Angelo also shared details about the company’s valuation. With the latest funding round, Quora is valued at $500 million. Despite a lower valuation compared to its peak, influenced by market changes like rising interest rates, D’Angelo views the investment as a testament to the team’s potential for growth.
As Quora embarks on the next phase of its creator monetization program, the majority of the new capital will be channeled into developing Poe as a comprehensive interface for innovative AI products. The company also plans to accelerate its product development and explore AI’s role in enhancing human expert knowledge sharing, complementing Quora’s existing platform.
Quora’s core product continues to be a pivotal part of the company’s mission to share and grow the world’s knowledge. With over 400 million monthly unique visitors and record-breaking usage, Quora remains a focus area, though it operates cash flow positive and independently of the Poe funding.
D’Angelo concluded by expressing gratitude to everyone who has contributed to Quora and Poe, underscoring their commitment to using the new capital to accelerate progress towards their mission.
