Quora Raises $50M At $400M From Peter Thiel, D’Angelo Puts In $20M Of His Own Money

Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation according to a report by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is Matrix’s Josh Hannah and Northbridge’s Jonathan Heiliger.

According to our own sources, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo put $20 million of his own money into the Series B financing. Thiel is leading personally and not through Founders Fund, breaking up the remaining $30 million between Matrix and Northbridge.

“Thiel added a lot of value to Facebook,” D’Angelo said about the Thiel investment, “And he’s been very helpful to us in the past. He understands these kinds of companies.”

The participation of Wikihow co-founder Hannah is also interesting to note, as he is painfully familiar with the Q&A space, through his WikiHow and eHow investments.

“Quora is a phenomenal resource to capture and share all the information where there are multiple points of view,” Hannah told me over the phone, “The Yahoo Answers and Answers.coms of the world have all fallen down to the lowest common denominator because of pandering to search traffic. Quora’s long-term vision to take the high road and create a platform for high quality discourse completely differentiates it from competitors.”

D’Angelo tells me that he’s going use the money to scale and grow the company even further, “It lets us focus on the long-term. And helps us build a really good team.”

According to AppData, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D’Angelo famously never reveal. “[The site] grows every week,” D’Angelo said, “I don’t really think of mainstream as a binary thing. I think that as it grows bigger, more and more people will use it to tell their stories.”