Quora, a Q&A startup founded by several early Facebook employees, including former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, has raised $11 million in a first round of funding. TechCrunch puts the valuation at a whopping $86 million, even though the site—which pitches itself as a “continually improving collections of questions and answers”—is still in closed beta.

Quora is the latest in a string of Q&A startups to get funding in recent months. Formspring.me, Fluther, Hunch and PeerPong have all raised rounds to expand in what is already a crowded market. Why the need for another player? “The way we think about this is there’s actually a lot of information that’s still in people’s heads that’s not on the internet,” D’Angelo tells TechCrunch.

Quora, of course, also has several differentiating features. For instance, users can edit both questions and answers but must use their real identities when they do so.

For investors, one obvious attraction is that the Q&A business model has already proven itself. Both WikiAnswers and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Answers have had huge success simply by providing easy-to-use (and very SEO friendly) platforms where users can pose and answer questions. WikiAnswers-owner Answers.com (NSDQ: ANSW), for instance, makes $21 million a year just by putting Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Adsense ads on its pages.

The funding round was led by Benchmark Capital. Matt Cohler, a Benchmark partner and former VP of product management at Facebook, is joining Quora’s board.

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