Continuing a dormant period of nearly seven years, Quora is once more in the fundraising game. The renowned question-and-answer forum has secured $75 million in an investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This newfound source of capital will be directed toward enhancing Poe, Quora’s inventive AI chat platform.
Quora differentiates its AI chatbots from conventional ones by striving to carve out its niche in the creator economy. As part of the proposed model, creators can derive an income from building distinctive AI bots, replacing traditional revenue schemes such as those built around YouTube ad revenues.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo stated that a significant portion of the investment will be channeled into compensating bot creators on the platform. This will be done through Quora's recently announced creator monetization program.
Last October, Quora rolled out this creator monetization scheme for Poe. This new initiative has provided a revenue-generating avenue for the creators designing prompts or bots on Poe. It has also expanded to cover developers who incorporate bots into Poe's AI ecosystem.
The latest fundraising success not only reaffirms Quora’s commitment to creators but also enables it to attract proficient developers to Poe, thanks to the opportunity of financial gains. Besides, Poe offers a broad assortment of text and image AI models like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and more. This vast selection provides creators ample creative tools to leverage.
In its last venture capital fundraising round in 2017, Quora was valued at $1.8 billion. However, the company's latest infusion of funds pegs its current worth at a mere $500 million, indicating a considerable plummet from its prior valuation.
D’Angelo attributes this valuation dip to the shift in the financial landscape marked by climbing interest rates resulting in higher cost of capital over the last couple of years. But, he expressed his contentment in having the firm aligned with the new market realities.
Since Poe was unveiled about a year ago, Quora's momentum has been gradually gathering steam. As per D’Angelo's statement, Quora registered its highest weekly use ever last week. Also, the platform boasts a staggering 400 million unique monthly visitors.
Notably, considering the exclusion of Poe, Quora remains cash flow positive. Hence, the entire fresh funding will be utilized to propel Poe’s growth. D’Angelo expressed the firm’s plan surrounding this.
Based on information reviewed from Apptopia in October, Poe's mobile application noted over 250,000 downloads in February, its debut month open to public. Until October, Poe observed over 18.4 million installs and surged to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
a16z partner David George expresses his optimism about Poe's future, noting that it already illustrates increasing returns on scale. He adds that Poe currently sits among the top five largest generative AI-related properties. Correspondingly, he mentions that creators have crafted over a million bots on the Poe platform.
Platforms like AppMaster indeed open up new possibilities for AI-driven chatbots, such as Poe. With no-code tools like AppMaster, platforms become more accessible, enabling creators to focus on their unique proposition, rather than the logistics of implementation. The advancement in no-code and low-code technology fosters new opportunities in the field of AI development.
