Quora revives business and raises funds for the first time in nearly seven years. The question and answer website secured $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which will be used for the growth of Poe, Quora's AI chat platform.

What sets Quora's AI chatbots apart from the rest of the competition?

Quora attempts to develop its own subfield of the creator economy based on AI chatbots. Instead of a creator earning a living through YouTube advertising revenue, they can try to pay their bills by building interesting AI bots.

"We expect that the majority of the funding for paying bot creators on the platform will be utilized through our recently launched creator monetization program," wrote Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo in a statement. In October, Quora launched this creator monetization program for Poe, which allows individuals who create bots or incentives on Poe to generate income.

Self-developers who integrate bots with the Poe-AI are entitled to earn money. Quora is betting big on creators, but this big funding allows the company to attract talented developers to Poe with the prospect of financial compensation. Additionally, Poe aggregates a variety of text and image AI models like ChatGPT, DALL-E3, Claude2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others, providing creators with a huge playground of tools.

As Quora last raised VC funding in 2017, the company was valued at around $1.8 billion. But Quora's latest upswing values the company at only $500 million, a steep decline from the previous upswing.

"Over the past two years, the market has undergone fundamental changes driven by rising interest rates and higher capital costs," wrote D'Angelo. "This means that our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are glad to finally be adapting to this new market." However, since the introduction of Poe about a year ago, Quora has been gaining some momentum.

D'Angelo also shared that Quora had its highest usage week last week and the platform has over 400 million monthly unique visitors. "Exclusive Poe is Quora cash-flow positive, so all of these new financial resources will be used for Poe," said D'Angelo.

According to data that TechCrunch was able to access from Apptopia in October, the mobile app of Poe was downloaded over 250,000 times in February, its first month of public availability. By October, Poe recorded over 18.4 million installations and grew to almost 1.22 million monthly active users.

Already now, Poe shows signs of increasing economies of scale, wrote a16z partner David George in a blog post. Currently, Poe is one of the top five largest generative AI-driven properties, and creators have built 1M+ bots on the Poe platform.