Quora

Quora runs a question-and-answer website where users post questions and others answer them, often writing under their real names and professional credentials. The company was co-founded in June 2009 by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo, Facebook's former chief technology officer, and Charlie Cheever, and it opened to the public in 2010. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Since 2023 it has also operated Poe, a chatbot product that gives users one interface to many large language models and lets creators build and earn money from their own bots.

Benchmark and Matrix Partners were early backers, and in March 2010 the company was valued at $86 million. In April 2014 it raised $80 million in a round led by Tiger Global, with Benchmark, Matrix Partners, North Bridge and Peter Thiel joining; the money went to the company rather than buying out existing holders, and the round was reported at a $900 million valuation. Quora went through Y Combinator in 2014. In April 2017 it raised about $85 million in a round co-led by Sam Altman on behalf of Y Combinator Continuity and Collaborative Fund at a valuation of about $1.8 billion, bringing total funding to about $226 million, with Benchmark, Matrix Partners, Tiger Global and Dustin Moskovitz also listed as backers. Wikipedia reports a further $60 million round led by Valor Equity Partners in 2019 at a $2 billion valuation. In January 2024 Andreessen Horowitz invested $75 million, mainly to pay creators of bots on Poe.

The 2024 round valued Quora at $500 million, well below its 2017 mark, and D'Angelo said the company was happy to be marked to the new market. At the time he reported more than 400 million monthly unique visitors to Quora. Revenue has stayed modest relative to traffic: Wikipedia cites $20 million in 2018 revenue. Poe has added subscriptions and, from April 2024, a price-per-message model for bot creators. The company remains private, and it laid off staff in 2020.

For investors, Quora shows how a large consumer audience does not automatically produce a large private valuation. Benchmark and Matrix backed it in its first years, crossover and growth capital arrived in 2014 and 2017, and the company then went almost seven years without a priced round before taking a down round from Andreessen Horowitz. Fifteen years after founding there has been no IPO or sale, so early backers are still waiting on liquidity, and the pivot into AI through Poe is the bet now carrying the valuation.