IBL News | New York
The Q&A website Quora announced this month it raised $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), destined to accelerate the growth of its AI chat platform ‘Poe,’ which was launched a year ago.
With this round — the first in nearly seven years — Quora is valued at $500 million, according to its CEO, Adam D’Angelo [in the picture above].
Despite this decline in valuation, Adam D’Angelo said that the company is cash flow positive.
“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 Adam D’Angelo in a statement.
“Our goal is for Poe to enable as many individual developers as possible to make a living, and for as many businesses as possible to operate profitably solely by using the platform.”
“This is true whether developers are creating a bot using an existing model with a prompt and any uploaded files, or whether they are training a model themselves,” he added.
Poe aggregates a wide range of text and image AI models like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others, which gives creators a huge playground of tools to access.
According to data TechCrunch viewed from Apptopia in October, Poe’s mobile app was downloaded more than 250,000 times in February, its first month open to the public. Through October, Poe saw over 18.4 million installs and grew to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.
“Already, Poe shows signs of increasing returns to scale,” wrote Andreessen Horowitz‘s partner 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.”
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