Quora just became the unicorn of subjective human knowledge. After eight years carefully cultivating an ntelligent 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. Quora tells me it’s “roughly doubled its valuation since our last fundraise” of $80 million in 2014 that pegged it at $900 million, meaning Quora is now worth around $1.8 billion.
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 as 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.
“The ads product is actually going pretty well” says co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo. Quora’s ads show a business’ name and description beneath a related question people are answering. The ad format is still in closed beta but D’Angelo says “so far the results are pretty promising, and that was something that was important to the investors in this round.”
D’Angelo admits that going eight years without a fully available ads product means Quora has moved slowly, noting “we’ve definitely focused more on our users and the…