In a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners LLC, the AI search engine company Perplexity AI raised \(73.36 million. Additional investors in this round include Databricks Ventures, former Twitter VP Elad Gil, ex-Git Hub CEO Nat Friedman, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, and Nvidia, along with Jeff Bezos. The current valuation of the business stands at \)520 million.
Established in August 2022 in California, the company is spearheaded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarat, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Srinivas, serving as the CEO, brings prior experience from OpenAI, focusing on relational models.
In a subsequent funding round, Mistral AI secured $385 million within seven months.
Reportedly seeking funding last year, as per The Knowledge, the startup has amassed a total of $100 million in funding thus far.
Perplexity’s search engine operates on internal big language concepts, presenting itself as a chatbot-like interface. This unique feature allows users to pose queries in natural language, distinguishing it from traditional search engines. Subscribers can opt for their preferred LLM, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, Google Gemini, or Perplexity Pro, for a monthly fee of $20.
With the introduction of Copilot at the end of May, Perplexity users can select from various “focus” modes. This AI research assistant enables customers to delve into specific search areas and tailor search queries with distinct follow-up questions.
Unlike conventional search engines or AI chatbots, Perplexity’s system eliminates the need for users to frame questions precisely, streamlining the search process. Srinivas emphasized in a blog post accompanying the funding announcement that this approach enhances the accuracy and depth of responses provided to users.
Srinivas noted that the Artificial search engine software has seen significant growth, reaching 10 million monthly active users in the past month alone, with projections to address over half a billion queries in 2023 since Perplexity’s inception. Additionally, the company’s mobile app has been downloaded over a million times across iOS and Android platforms during this period.
