Perplexity is in the final stages of raising $500 million in funding, which would value it at nine-billion-dollars.
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Reuters reported on the AI-powered answer engine’s financial news, basing its information on a source, who it says is “familiar with the matter”.
The international news agency inferred that the new investment was indicative of growing investor enthusiasm surrounding AI companies.
Perplexity’s AI engine defines itself as “an AI assistant designed to provide accurate information, answer questions, and engage users with insightful, well-researched content.”
Aravind Srinivas, Cofounder and CEO of Perplexity, gives an idea of what investors are buying into via LinkedIn:
“Perplexity is on a mission to build the world’s most knowledge centric company.
“Backed by Jeff Bezos, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Tobi Lutke, Jeff Dean, Susan Wojcicki, Yann LeCun, Naval Ravikant, Paul Buchheit, Andrej Karpathy, and several others, Perplexity AI has built the world’s first generally available conversational answer engine that directly answers questions about any topic.”
Rising Valuation
This latest of four funding rounds this year is being led by the venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), which has a board seat within the startup, according to Reuter’s source.
Previously Perplexity had raised $73.6 million in Series B funding in January. The funding round was again led by IVP and resulted in a valuation of around $520 million.
Now, Perplexity’s valuation has now jumped in the region of 18 times, from roughly $500 million at the start of the year to verging on nine billion, assuming it will close out another successful round of funding.
The company’s most recent funding round, back in June, led to its valuation of three billion dollars.
Rapid Expansion
Perplexity’s rise to the artificial intelligence world stage has been meteoric, despite some of the challenges it has faced, including accusations of plagiarised content from online news publications.
In October, for example, the New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice, as it alleged Perplexity has been scraping data from its pages to generate its answers. So far, these allegations have been denied.
In terms of the company’s technology and uptake, however, Perplexity has evidently made huge progress in a very short space of time.
In the last month alone, Perplexity has teamed up with Zoom to enhance Zoom AI companion and GitHub to enable access to the web while coding and debugging, enhanced its handling of the finance vertical, and launched ‘Internal Knowledge Search’.
Perplexity has also added ‘Reasoning Mode’ in Pro Search, introduced its first desktop app for MacOS that went to number one across all free app on the Mac Store, and more. It even provided live coverage of the US elections.
OpenAI is taking the threat from Perplexity’s rise in popularity seriously having just last week launched a ChatGPT search feature to compete with Perplexity along with other key rivals like Google and Microsoft.
Perplexity has been downloaded over two million times and it answers over 230 million queries per month, CNBC reported.
