a16z leads Quora's $75M funding for AI chatbot Poe

Quora, the Q&A platform, has secured its first funding round in almost seven years, accumulating $75M from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The funds are earmarked for the expansion of Poe, Quora's AI chatbot platform.

• Quora AI Functionality: The uniqueness of Quora lies in its vision to carve out a niche within the creator economy centered around AI chatbots. This novel concept allows creators to monetize the creation of AI bots as opposed to relying on ad revenue from platforms like YouTube.

• Money Allocation: Quora CEO, Adam D’Angelo, stated a significant portion of the investment will be allocated to the payment of bot creators on the platform through a recently introduced monetization program. The funding will enable Quora to attract proficient developers to Poe with promises of monetary compensation.

• Earn from AI: In October, Quora initiated a monetization program for Poe, enabling individuals who create bots or prompts on Poe to generate income. Developers integrating bots with Poe's AI also qualify for financial benefits. Quora launched Poe a year ago and has experienced significant growth since then, reaching its highest usage week recently and amassing over 400 million monthly unique visitors.

• Meet Poe: Poe integrates a variety of text and image AI models like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others, offering creators a vast array of tools.

• Valuation Status: Despite being valued at $1.8B during its last VC funding round in 2017, Quora’s current valuation stands at $500M due to market fluctuations caused by rising interest rates and increased capital costs. Excluding Poe, Quora is cash flow positive.

Since its public release, Poe's mobile app was downloaded more than 250,000 times in its first month and has since grown to 1.22 million monthly active users.