Question-and-answer forum site Quora Inc. said Tuesday that it has raised $75 million in new funding led by Andreessen Horowitz to accelerate the growth of its artificial intelligence chatbot platform Poe AI, which allows users to create and make money from their own bots.

While most other companies have focused on building bigger and better generative AI models to converse with users, answer questions and summarize documents, Quora has taken a different angle with Poe. The company’s approach has been to provide access to a multitude of different third-party models and allow users to fashion their own chatbots and build them with their own specialized knowledge and personality.

“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,” Adam D’Angelo said in the announcement.

Quora launched Poe as a standalone question-answering AI chatbot in February 2023 when the company announced its intent to make the platform available for developers to build on to serve and reach users. In October, the company released an application programming interface and a monetization mechanism for users to make money off chatbots.

Poe provides support for iOS, Android, web and MacOS. Anyone can create a new AI chatbot with a prompt and can build on top of it without needing to pay for access. It also includes features such as threading, file uploading and image generation.

Chatbot builders receive a payout if a user subscribes to Quora. Creators get a cut of the revenue and they will also be able to set a per-message fee.

“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,” D’Angelo said.

For most users, accessing and producing a chatbot or an image bot would be prohibitively expensive, explained D’Angelo. Training and prompting most third-party models and then reaching broad enough audiences in order to make them worth the time and energy would be extremely difficult given the costs. Because the platform brings so many users together on a large platform, it lowers the overall costs for everyone and brings a large audience together in one place for greater reach.

Users also get access to many generative AI model providers, including conversational text models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic Inc.’s Claude and open-source models such as Meta Platform Inc.’s Llama 2. The platform also provides access to image-generating models such as Stability AI Ltd.’s SDXL2 and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. That allows creators to experiment with models in the combinations they desire to produce compelling user experiences.

For example, developers can create image-generating bots that use a specific prompt to always create a particular effect such as artwork in the style of a famous artist such as Van Gogh or fingerpaint illustrations. Conversational bots could be primed with documents about Victorian poetry and prompts allowing users to create historical or fantastical poems and stories. A developer could also create a friendly chatbot to help students with their homework, or an image generator bot that produces simple logos.

D’Angelo said Poe AI has seen steady growth since it launched almost a year ago and last week was the highest usage week ever, with more than 400 million unique visitors.

“Our focus is on what we can do with this new capital,” said D’Angelo. “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.”

Image: Quora