TL;DR:
- Search startup Perplexity AI has raised $73.6 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm IVP.
- The round also included investments from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Databricks, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
- Perplexity AI’s search tools offer instant answers to user queries, powered by large language models.
- The company plans to use the funding to hire more staff and expand its product offerings.
- Despite its growth, Perplexity AI faces stiff competition from Google, which dominates the search market with a 90% market share.
Search startup Perplexity AI has raised $73.6 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm IVP, with participation from prominent investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. The round valued the company at approximately $520 million. Perplexity AI’s search tools provide users with instant answers to questions, supported by a range of large language models. The company plans to use the funding to expand its workforce and develop new products.
Perplexity AI raised $25.6 million in a previous funding round in March 2023, led by NEA. The company claims to have served over 500 million queries in 2023, despite spending only a small amount on marketing. The startup currently has 38 employees, with plans to increase this number to around 60 by the end of the year. In December, its website and mobile web received 45 million visits, compared to 2.2 million when the service first launched in December 2022.
Despite its rapid growth, Perplexity AI faces significant competition in the online search market, where Google commands a 90% market share. Microsoft, which backs OpenAI, has been integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its Bing search engine but has so far struggled to compete with Google. Perplexity AI’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, believes the company’s advantage lies in its ability to fine-tune multiple AI models, rather than relying on a single model. He envisions Perplexity AI as the “next generation” of search, while Google becomes viewed as “legacy and old.”
