Quora raised $75M from a16z to develop Poe, its AI chat bot platform

Quora is again at it, elevating funding for the primary time in practically seven years. The questions and solutions web site nabbed $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which might be used to energy the expansion of Poe, Quora’s AI chat platform.

What makes Quora’s AI chatbots totally different from the remainder of the pack? Quora is attempting to develop its own subset of the creator economy based mostly round AI chatbots. So, as a substitute of a creator making a dwelling from YouTube advert income, they will attempt to pay the payments by constructing attention-grabbing AI bots.

“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,” wrote Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo in an announcement.

In October, Quora launched this creator monetization program for Poe, which permits individuals who create bots or prompts on Poe to generate income. Even builders who combine bots with the Poe AI are eligible to earn cash.

Quora is betting huge on creators, however this huge fundraise permits the corporate to lure proficient builders to Poe with the promise of economic compensation. Plus, Poe aggregates a variety of textual content and picture AI fashions like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Secure Diffusion, Llama and others, which provides creators an enormous playground of instruments to entry.

When Quora final raised VC funding in 2017, the corporate was valued at round $1.8 billion. However Quora’s newest elevate values the corporate at simply $500 million, a steep decline from its earlier elevate.

“In the last two years, the market has changed substantially, driven by rising interest rates and higher cost of capital,” D’Angelo wrote. “This means our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are happy to finally be marked to this new market.”

Because the launch of Poe a couple of yr in the past, nevertheless, Quora is choosing up some steam. D’Angelo additionally shared that Quora had its highest utilization week ever final week, and that the platform has over 400 million month-to-month distinctive guests.

“Excluding Poe, Quora is cash flow positive, so all of this new funding will be used on Poe,” D’Angelo stated.

In accordance with data TechCrunch considered from Apptopia in October, Poe’s cell app was downloaded over 250,000 occasions in February, its first month open to the general public. Via October, Poe noticed over 18.4 million installs and grew to almost 1.22 million month-to-month energetic customers.

“Already, Poe shows signs of increasing returns to scale,” wrote a16z associate David George in a blog post. “Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 largest generative AI-related properties, and creators have built 1M+ bots on Poe the platform.”