Quora secures $75M funding from a16z to expand Poe, its AI chat bot platform | GVS – Global Village space
Quora, the popular questions and answers website, has secured $75 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to support the growth of its AI chat platform, Poe. The funding will primarily be used to compensate creators of bots on the platform through Quora’s recently-launched creator monetization program.
What sets Quora’s AI chatbots apart from others is its focus on developing a subset of the creator economy centered around AI chatbots. Instead of relying on ad revenue from platforms like YouTube, creators can now earn a living by building interesting 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.”
Quora launched the creator monetization program for Poe in October, allowing creators to generate revenue from their bots or prompts. Even developers who integrate bots with the Poe AI are eligible to earn money.
The significant funding raised by Quora enables the company to attract talented developers to Poe by offering financial compensation. Poe provides access to a wide range of text and image AI models, including ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others, giving creators a vast playground of tools to work with.
While Quora’s previous VC funding in 2017 valued the company at around $1.8 billion, the latest raise values it at $500 million. D’Angelo attributes this decline to changes in the market, such as rising interest rates and higher cost of capital.
Despite the decline in valuation, Quora has experienced growth since the launch of Poe about a year ago. D’Angelo revealed that Quora had its highest usage week ever recently and boasts over 400 million monthly unique visitors. He also mentioned that Quora, excluding Poe, is cash flow positive, meaning all the new funding will be directed towards Poe.
According to data from Apptopia in October, Poe’s mobile app garnered over 250,000 downloads in its first month open to the public. By October, Poe had accumulated over 18.4 million installs and nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
a16z partner David George highlighted Poe’s success in a blog post, stating, “Already, Poe shows signs of increasing returns to scale. Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 largest generative AI-related properties, and creators have built 1M+ bots on Poe the platform.”
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