During the past two years, companies with multi-billion dollar valuations that have not been supported by a credible business model have seen their valuations collapse. But there are still a few that have managed to retain and even grow into a Billion Dollar Unicorn status, despite their lackluster business models. Crowd-sourced information site Quora is one such example.

Quora’s Financials

Quora was founded in 2009 by former Facebook CTO, Adam D’Angelo, and Charlie Cheever as a private, by-invitation-only initiative. The company allowed users to post, reply, edit, and comment on categorized questions. Within a year of its launch, Quora had opened its access to all users. Quora operates on a crowdsourced model. It expects users to use their real name on the site and register by connecting their Quora accounts with their social media accounts.

Over the past few years, Quora has managed to attract a big following. As of early 2016, the company claimed that it had 190 million monthly users, compared with 100 million users a year ago who access its user generated content. Till recently, Quora did not have a revenue model and its financials are unknown.

Quora has been venture funded so far. It has raised $226 million in funding from investors including Collaborative Fund, Matrix Partners, Dustin Moskovitz, Tiger Global Management, Y Combinator, North Bridge Venture Partners & Growth Equity, Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Benchmark, and SV Angel. Its last funding round was held earlier this April when it raised $85 million at a valuation of $1.8 billion. An earlier round was held in 2014, when it raised $80 million at a valuation of $900 million. Some believe that it may now be preparing for an IPO. It has, of late, added several new senior hires including Kelly Battles, Wikimedia Foundation Trustee, as its first CFO; Helen Min as its first head of marketing; Karen Kramer as its first general counsel; and Tami Rosen, former Apple executive, as its VP People. The company has also seen some significant exits. Last year, VP of Finance Steven Trieu quit soon after the exit of its head of business and community Marc Bodnick.

Quora’s Expansion

Last year, Quora began experimenting with an advertising model. It began by showing ads on only a very small number of question pages depending on the viewership of the question page. The advertisements sit below questions and are identified with the “promoted by” tag. It claims that the beta advertising product is “going pretty well”. Its advertising metrics are not known.

Besides monetization, Quora is also looking at market expansion. Till early last year, Quora was available only in English. In August 2016, it launched its Spanish version. Now, Quora is also available in French and has a beta version of their German and Italian pages.

Quora still faces significant competition from bigger players such as Reddit and Yahoo. Here is an interesting infographic, courtesy Zirra’s research, that shows how Quora’s traffic has grown compared with its competitors over the past year. Clearly Quora has a long way to go.

(Click on image to enlarge)