Quora, the popular question-and-answer platform, has raised $75 million in new funding led by prominent VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to power the growth of Poe, its AI-powered conversation app.
Launched in February last year, Poe has already garnered millions of users on its free and premium subscription tiers. It enables consumers to chat with a variety of AI bots and products, while also giving developers tools to easily build and monetize their own AI applications.
The fresh capital from a16z will be used to accelerate Poe's product roadmap and scale its recently introduced creator monetization initiatives. The goal is to incentivize developers to build bots and other AI-powered experiences on Poe that consumers can access through a single convenient interface.
"We see Poe's role with respect to AI being similar to the role the web browser played in accelerating progress during the development of the early internet," said Quora founder Adam D'Angelo in an announcement. "This shapes our two goals: Be the best way for consumers to chat with a variety of AI products. And be the easiest way for a developer to build an AI chat product and reach a mass audience."
Poe currently supports connectivity with leading AI models like ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Claude, and more - enabling users to access these cutting-edge capabilities without needing to navigate complex sign-ups or disparate platforms. Its subscription offering also removes usage limits for certain models.
The platform has big ambitions to democratize and mainstream AI adoption to over 5 billion global internet users. And with the new round valuing Quora at $500 million, it now has fresh resources to realize that mission and establish itself as a vital aggregation layer in the AI ecosystem.
David George of a16z will join Poe's board as part of the investment. "One of our early bonding moments was over the concept of increasing returns to scale - a theory that underpins Poe's competitive advantage," said George. "Poe has the added advantage of being able to tap the Quora community of 400 million+ users."
While Quora itself continues to grow as a knowledge sharing site, it is now cash flow positive. So the new a16z backing will focus squarely on accelerating innovation and creator incentives within Poe as consumer excitement around AI conversational interfaces gains momentum globally.