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Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine, triples its valuation to $9bn
Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-driven search engine, has closed its fourth funding round this year, tripling its valuation to $9bn as it seeks to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI.
Funding Round Details
The $500mn round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with involvement from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Previous investors have included SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as several prominent names from the AI industry such as OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.
Company Growth
The San Francisco-based group has grown rapidly this year, with its product receiving hundreds of millions of queries a month. It has 15mn monthly active users with most of that traffic coming from the US.
Competitive Landscape
The new funding will help Perplexity compete with west coast rivals in an increasingly fierce fight for engineers. “The talent war for AI is like no other time before,” according to Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks, the AI and data analytics company that announced a $10bn fundraising round on Tuesday.
Advertising Plans
Perplexity is seeking to capitalise and improve on the search advertising system pioneered by Google, in which marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries. It is in talks with major brands to pilot advertising on its platform.
Industry Trends
In a sign of growing competition in the space, AI companies have recently targeted the search market by linking up chatbots to the internet. This week, OpenAI rolled out web searching for its popular ChatGPT product, while Anthropic’s Claude can perform searches through a feature called “computer use”.
Conclusion
Perplexity’s latest round has pushed its valuation higher by nine-fold since the start of the year, in another sign of how hot start-ups developing new AI tools can draw in hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in investment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Perplexity?
A: Perplexity is an artificial intelligence-driven search engine.
Q: Who led the funding round?
A: Institutional Venture Partners led the funding round, with involvement from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price.
Q: What is the valuation of Perplexity?
A: Perplexity’s valuation has tripled to $9bn.
Q: How many monthly active users does Perplexity have?
A: Perplexity has 15mn monthly active users, with most of that traffic coming from the US.
Q: What is the company’s revenue growth?
A: Perplexity’s annualised revenues have grown from $5mn in January to $35mn in August.
