Quora

In 2009, Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s former chief technology officer, and early Facebook engineer Charlie Cheever founded Quora. D’Angelo had left Facebook in 2008; the two, together with designer Rebekah Cox, first conceived of the site as a platform where people could share knowledge they normally would not publish.⁠[1][2][2][3][2]

Recalling the company’s start in 2010, the founding team said they had decided from the outset to build a question-and-answer system and spent the first six months working out the details of the product; they believed most of the information people have is still in their heads rather than on the internet, and hoped to organize it into a useful database.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On January 4, 2010, Quora launched in an invitation-only private beta; to join, a new user had to be invited by an existing user with one of their ten invitations.⁠[4][4]

In March 2010, Quora completed its first funding round, led by Benchmark Capital, and Benchmark partner and former Facebook executive Matt Cohler joined the board. The company and its investor confirmed the funding but did not disclose the amount or valuation; two sets of figures circulated: an $11 million round at an $86 million valuation, or $14 million eventually raised at an $87.5 million valuation.⁠[4][4][4][5]

On June 21, 2010, Quora opened registration to the public. D’Angelo said the company was confident it could integrate new users while maintaining the site’s quality, but that it put quality ahead of growth and would limit registration if necessary; at that point the site was also not yet open to search engines.⁠[5][5][5][5]

D’Angelo later recalled that Quora did not really use machine learning in its first year, began using AI to rank the feed in 2011, and that machine learning for recommender systems subsequently became an important technology for Quora.⁠[3][3]

In May 2012, Quora raised $50 million in Series B funding at a $400 million pre-money valuation. Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, then a Facebook board member, led the round personally rather than through Founders Fund; D’Angelo put in $20 million of his own money, and Matrix’s Josh Hannah and Northbridge’s Jonathan Heiliger also invested. D’Angelo said the money would be used to scale the company and build its team, allowing it to focus on the long term.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

In July 2012, Quora announced that because it was running out of office space, it would move from Palo Alto to 650 Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, occupying the fourth and fifth floors of the building housing Mozilla; the company then had about 40 employees, and the new space could accommodate four times as many.⁠[7][7][7][7]

In September 2012, Charlie Cheever stepped back from his day-to-day role at the company to become an advisor. D’Angelo said both sides felt this was the best arrangement and that Cheever would always be a founder of Quora. As of 2014, D’Angelo was the only co-founder remaining at the company.⁠[2][2][8]

In April 2014, Quora raised an $80 million Series C round from Tiger Global Management at a valuation of about $900 million, with Benchmark, Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Peter Thiel also participating. D’Angelo said the company had not been fundraising and took the round to stay independent for the long term, adding that the company would very likely adopt an ad-based revenue model.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

In May 2014, Quora joined the startup accelerator Y Combinator. D’Angelo said YC had invested an amount similar to its standard $120,000 as part of the Series C round, and that the company was not trying to pretend to be a small company but wanted to be part of YC’s founder network.⁠[8][8]

In March 2016, Quora made its first acquisition, buying Parlio, a discussion site founded by former Google employee Wael Ghonim, who had been jailed for sparking the Egyptian Revolution; the Parlio team joined Quora, and posting on the Parlio site ended. At the time, Quora had reached 100 million monthly unique visitors.⁠[10][10][10][10]

In April 2016, Quora began showing ads marked “promoted by” below a small number of question pages, with Lever, Uber, Wealthfront, and Sunrun as its first advertisers. At the time, half of Quora’s visitors came from the United States and 15% from India.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

In April 2017, Quora raised an $85 million Series D round co-led by Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, with Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, and Dustin Moskovitz also participating, at a valuation roughly double that of the previous round, about $1.8 billion, bringing its total funding to $226 million. At the time, Quora had 190 million monthly users, and its ad product was still in closed beta.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12][12]

On December 3, 2018, Quora announced that a “malicious third party” had gained unauthorized access to its systems the previous Friday, potentially affecting data from about 100 million users, including account information such as names, email addresses, IP addresses, and encrypted passwords; public and non-public content and actions; and data imported from linked networks with authorization. Anonymous questions and answers were not affected because the company does not store the identities of anonymous posters. The company logged out affected users and invalidated their passwords, retained a digital forensics firm to investigate, and notified law enforcement.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13][1][13]

In January 2020, Quora laid off staff in its Bay Area and New York offices without disclosing the scale. D’Angelo said the company needed to reduce its burn rate to a sustainable level and did not want to depend on outside capital.⁠[14][14][14][14]

In August 2021, Quora launched Quora+, a subscription service for creator monetization: subscribers paying $5 a month or $50 a year could read content that creators chose to put behind a paywall, with subscription fees distributed to creators in proportion to how much of their content was read; creators could also offer paid subscriptions in Spaces, with Quora taking 5%. The company said at the time that it was on track to be cash flow positive from ads alone.⁠[15][15][15][15]

In December 2022, Quora launched the AI chat platform Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration), initially available only to invited users on iOS, which let users converse with multiple AI chatbots. Poe was not an attempt to build a ChatGPT-like model from scratch; a Quora spokesperson said the company hoped to apply what it had learned about consumer internet products over twelve years of operating Quora to this new domain.⁠[16][16][16][16][16]

In February 2023, Poe opened to all iOS users, launching with three chatbots, Sage, Claude, and Dragonfly; Sage and Dragonfly were powered by OpenAI technology and Claude by AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry technology. The company launched Poe as a standalone product independent of Quora, planning to distribute its content on the Quora website, with its 400 million monthly visitors, once it met quality standards.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17]

On March 14, 2023, Poe launched paid subscriptions at $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year, giving paying users access to bots based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude+, subject to monthly usage caps.⁠[18][18][18][18]

On October 25, 2023, Poe launched creator monetization: when a bot leads a user to a paid subscription, the platform shares revenue with the creator; creators can also set a per-message fee, which Quora pays.⁠[19][19][19][19]

In January 2024, Quora received a $75 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, its first fundraising in nearly seven years, at a valuation of $500 million, below its valuation of about $1.8 billion in 2017. D’Angelo attributed the lower valuation to rising interest rates and higher costs of capital and said most of the money would be used to pay bot creators on Poe; excluding Poe, Quora itself was cash flow positive, with more than 400 million monthly unique visitors. a16z said creators had built more than 1 million bots on Poe.⁠[20][20][20][20][20][20][20][21]

On July 31, 2025, Poe released a developer API with no separate fee, billed instead through its existing point-based subscription plans; developers can use the API to access different models or bots in their own applications, and the platform then offered more than 100 models across voice, text, image, and video.⁠[22][22][22][22]

In November 2025, Poe launched group chats, allowing users to start group chats with up to 200 people and use more than 200 text, image, video, and audio models within a single conversation.⁠[23]

Quora: Official website: https://www.quora.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Poe: Official website: https://poe.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]