Tiger Global Management, an investment management firm managed by Chase Coleman, invested $80 million in Quora, a question and answer startup founded by former employees of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) in 2009.
The investment from Tiger Global is part of the third round of funding raised by Quora. Some of its existing investors including Benchmark Capital, Matrix, North Bridge, and Peter Thiel also provided more financing. The startup raised $11 million and $60 million in funding in 2010 and 2011, respectively.
Last financing round
According to Quoras’s head of operations Marc Bodnick, the additional $80 million in funding from Tiger Global will be the last round for the company and he emphasized that they want to remain independent for a long time.
“This capital will allow us to make sure we are permanent as a company, as a library, as a product,” Bodnick said. “We want to be an independent company for the long term, and not be acquired, so this capital is basically insurance that allows us to build the best possible product,” said Bodnick as quoted by CNET.
Website audience
Currently, Quora is part of a group of startups that are not yet making any revenue that received funding from investors. Bodnick indicated that Quora will likely welcome advertising later to make money, but he pointed out that their top priority on their list is to improve its service and make it available in different languages.
The company is planning to add another language and start experimenting on advertising in 2015. Bodnick is confident that Quora’s audience will be attractive to advertisers because its visitors are looking for specific information.
With regards to the number of people visiting the site, Bodnick did not provide a specific number, but he emphasized that Quora has hundreds of millions of visitors every month. According to him, 40% of the website’s traffic comes through its mobile apps.
Data from Nielsen indicated that Quora had 1.98 million unique visitors and spent an average of 13.5 minutes browsing the website in January this year.
On the other hand, some critics are saying that Quora is still way behind other Q&A services like Yahoo Answers based on data from comScore. In February, Quora attracted 2,165 unique visitors compared with 94,000 unique visitors for Yahoo Answers.
