{"id":339020,"date":"2017-04-22T02:37:44","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T18:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1479870"},"modified":"2017-04-22T02:37:44","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T18:37:44","slug":"qa-app-quora-valued-around-1-8-billion-in-85-million-fundraise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/qa-app-quora-valued-around-1-8-billion-in-85-million-fundraise\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A app Quora valued around $1.8 billion in $85 million fundraise"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Quora just became the unicorn of subjective human knowledge. After eight years carefully cultivating an intelligent question and answer community, it\u2019s just raised an $85 million Series D round co-led by Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator\u2019s Continuity Fund. Quora tells me it\u2019s \u201croughly doubled its valuation since our last fundraise\u201d of $80 million<\/a> in 2014 that pegged it at $900 million, meaning Quora is now worth around $1.8 billion.<\/p>\n

The two big drivers of that rapid value increase have been user growth and positive early results from its ad tests. Quora now has 190 million monthly users, up from 100 million a year ago. That proves it has the potential to achieve ubiquity\u00a0as a source of expert opinions on just about everything. This scale also makes it appealing to advertisers lured by the high degree of intent exhibited by Quora readers, who might be likely to buy something connected to the answers they find.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Quora co-founder and CEO Adam D\u2019Angelo<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThe ads product is actually going pretty well,\u201d says co-founder and CEO Adam D\u2019Angelo. Quora\u2019s ads<\/a> show a business\u2019 name and description beneath a related question people are answering. The ad format is still in closed beta but D\u2019Angelo says \u201cso far the results are pretty promising, and that was something that was important to the investors in this round.\u201d<\/p>\n

D\u2019Angelo admits that going eight years without a fully available ads product means Quora has moved slowly, noting, \u201cwe\u2019ve definitely focused more on our users and the mission than on monetization.\u201d But with such a big idea and market it\u2019s chasing, D\u2019Angelo\u2019s connections from being Facebook\u2019s first CTO, and no high-quality competitors in sight, Quora has had the luxury of time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Uniquorn<\/h2>\n

Along with Sam Altman and YC Continuity<\/a>, and Collaborative Fund<\/a>, previous investors\u00a0Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz also joined the round. They clearly see the potential longevity of Quora. While Wikipedia is a second-hand source of essentially objective information, Quora collects first-hand subjective wisdom. People will always need answers, and if Quora builds the best place to find them, its evergreen content could rake in ad dollars for years and years to come.<\/p>\n

Quora does have to contend with Yahoo Answers Now, which is the veteran of the Q&A space despite the unreliable quality of its content. And artificial intelligence could one day offer new ways to aggregate subjective knowledge that cuts out Quora. But the new cash\u00a0VentureBeat<\/a> reported on earlier today brings it to a total of $226 million raised<\/a>, allowing\u00a0Quora\u00a0to keep playing its long game.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main thing we\u2019re going to put money into is internationalization,\u201d says D\u2019Angelo. Eventually, \u201cwe\u2019d like to let users translate content back and forth, but we haven\u2019t built that yet.\u201d Instead, D\u2019Angelo says Quora has been spawning dedicated wings of its app for different languages. Quora launched in Spanish last year to collect questions and answers natively written in that tongue. It\u2019s in beta for French, while German and Italian are coming in a few months. \u201cWe want to get to all the languages over the next year or two,\u201d D\u2019Angelo tells me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When asked what he thinks of the relatively quiet company getting more attention because of its new unicorn status, D\u2019Angelo characteristically demurred, saying, \u201cI don\u2019t expect anything to really change.\u00a0We\u2019ve always just cared about the mission.\u00a0The most important thing for us is to get more knowledge shared.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as its status rises, Quora could finally cross the mindshare threshold to unlock its next wave of growth: Getting people to Google not \u201cWhat are the best travel hacks?\u201d but instead, \u201cWhat are the best travel hacks, Quora?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" Quora just became the unicorn of subjective human knowledge. After eight years carefully cultivating an intelligent question and answer community, it’s just raised an $85 million Series D round co-led by Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-339020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}