Quora Gets $75M to Grow Poe into the Web Browser of AI Products
The open bot platform gets an injection for growth
Quora founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo announced this week that the company had secured $75 million in new funding from Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $500 million. D’Angelo acknowledged that this valuation is below Quora’s previous peak of $2 billion in 2020. In fact, the new figure is well below the $900 million valuation from 2014.
Still, the funding shows that Poe, Quora’s “AI chat platform,” may have injected new life into the company. D’Angelo said the core Quora business is cash-flow positive, and the new funding will be for Poe’s development. According to D’Angelo:
Poe has millions of users, some using our free tier and others taking advantage of premium benefits through subscription. There are millions of bots created by Poe users through prompting and by developers through our API…
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. This shapes our two goals:
Be the best way for consumers to chat with a variety of AI products.
Be the easiest way for a developer to build an AI chat product and reach a mass audience. This is true whether they are creating a bot using an existing model with a prompt and any uploaded files, or whether they are training a model themselves.
We hope that by pursuing these goals, we can accelerate the mainstream adoption of AI and all the benefits that it will bring to society, including increased access to knowledge, democratized creative expression, and accelerated economic growth.
AI Chatbot Builder
Poe become known for providing early access to several large language models (LLM) through its chatbots. Many people had the opportunity to try out the capabilities of Anthropic’s Claude LLM through Poe before gaining access directly from the company. The key points of Poe’s development were April 2023, when Poe added the ability for users to create their own generative AI chatbots, and October 2023, when it introduced a marketplace, just days prior to OpenAI’s GPTs announcement.
December 2022: Quora launched Poe, the Platform for Open Exploration, as a ChatGPT-like general knowledge chatbot.
March 2023: Poe added a subscription tier that matched the $20 per month price of ChatGPT Plus.
April 2023: Poe added the ability to create your own bots using either ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude large language models (LLM).
July 2023: Poe adds support for Meta’s Llama 2 LLM.
August 2023: Poe adds support for Google’s PaLM 2 LLM.
October 2023: Poe announces a new marketplace where custom bot creators can earn revenue from users. Bot creators can also add a custom knowledge base to ground the answers, customize responses, and share with others.
D’Angelo’s position on OpenAI’s board and participation in the original ouster of Sam Altman called into question his apparent conflict of interest regarding Poe and ChatGPT. However, other board members appear to be unconcerned as he is the only OpenAI board member who retained a board position after the dust-up with Sam Altma’s firing and re-hiring.
How Poe is Different
While Poe is definitely competitive with the growing ChatGPT ecosystem, it is also fair to say there are meaningful differences in its offering. ChatGPT offers a generalist chatbot, the ability to create custom chatbots, and a marketplace for bot creators to promote the availability of their bots. Poe has these features as well, but there is a critical difference. ChatGPT’s ecosystem is entirely driven by OpenAI’s LLMs. Chatbots made available through Poe could be supported by any LLM.
Quora has an interesting strategy. The website recently had 400 million monthly users, and it has a lot of data that is curated by experts (admittedly, alongside a lot of data written by contributors who appear to have little expertise). Still, it has curated data to draw from and a large user base.
Other generative AI chat assistant offerings promote their own products. OpenAI provides ChatGPT. Microsoft has Copilot. Google offers Duet AI within Google Workspace and Bard as a generalist product. Anthropic has Claude.
Perplexity and Amazon’s PartyRock offer access to more than one LLM as part of their services, but there is only one bot interface. Poe is about variety. You can have different chat assistants provided by different developers powered by different LLMs, all in one place. You might think of it as a sandbox of sandboxes. That potentially introduces unique value.
There is value in the consistency and seamless experience offered by a platform like ChatGPT. However, that may turn out to be limiting. The ecosystem depends entirely on one company’s LLMs, other foundation models, developer features, and imagination. Poe enables users to leverage a set of different LLMs and allows developers to publish chat assistants supported by other models and platforms.
Poe is a bot creation and listing marketplace. The approach enables everyday users without software development skills to create chat assistants and other conversational generative AI experiences and place those alongside products created by software developers. Both benefit from distribution, ease of access, and the opportunity for monetization. D’Angelo said he expects much of the new funding will help grow the bot creator economy.
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…
As we launch the next phase of our creator monetization program, we expect the majority of this funding will go to developers to help make Poe a single interface for all of the most innovative new AI products. We also look forward to further accelerating our already rapid product development pace, and to creating opportunities where AI can accelerate human expert knowledge sharing through the complementarity of Poe and Quora.
ChatGPT and similar knowledge chat assistants are an existential threat to Quora. Why go to a crowdsourced knowledge expert website when LLM-backed chat assistants offer more comprehensive results faster? Poe’s answer is to enable experts to create custom knowledge bots that highlight their expertise and also go beyond knowledge domains to entertainment and productivity.
Quora has put forward an interesting strategy that is well worth monitoring. Poe now has another $75 million to help execute its plan and see if more growth and user loyalty follow.
