Quora raises $85 million; valued at $1.8 billion

Quora, an online question and answer community, has raised $85 million in a Series D funding round led by Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. Along with the two lead investors, previous investors Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz also joined the round. The current funding valued the startup at $1.8 billion, almost double of what it was valued at during last fundraise of $80 million in 2014. Quora boasts of 190 million monthly users, up from 100 million last year. It has started testing ads on its platform, and positive response for them is one of the driving factors for high valuation of the startup.

Adam D’Angelo, co-founder and CEO Quora, said that “The ads product is actually going pretty well. So far the results are promising, and that was important to the investors in this round”. The company has been experimenting with its platform. It is spawning dedicated wings of its application for different languages. The Spanish application is already out while the French one is in beta state.

Though Wikipedia and Quora seems similar on broad levels, the major difference is that while Wikipedia is a second-hand source of essentially objective information, Quora collects first-hand subjective wisdom.