Perplexity AI, Valued at $500m, Driving AI-Native Search Era
AI search startup Perplexity has announced a latest round of investment including from Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as competition in the search space continues to hot up.
Perplexity was founded in August 2022 on the belief that searching for information should be a straightforward, efficient experience, free from the influence of advertising-driven models. Since publicly launching what it describes at the world’s ‘first fully functional conversational answer engine’ in 2023, Perplexity has grown to 10 million monthly active users.
The California-based startup announced that it has raised US$73.6m in Series B funding from trusted VC firms and prominent tech visionaries. IVP led the round with continued support from Seed and Series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds and Kindred Ventures, among others. Building upon its Series A earlier in 2023, Perplexity has now raised US$100m to date.
Perplexity AI: AI-native search built on accuracy and transparency
"Perplexity is intensely building a product capable of bringing the power of AI to billions,” explains Cack Wilhelm, General Partner at IVP, who led the Series B funding round and joins Perplexity’s Board of Directors. “The team possesses the unique ability to uphold a grand, long-term vision while shipping product relentlessly, requirements to tackle a problem as important and fundamental as search.”
Perplexity says that, with its search tools, users get instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included. In an era where misinformation and AI hallucinations are causing increasing concern, the startup is built on the idea that accuracy and transparency are prerequisites to the success of AI-powered search.
“While there has been a lot of excitement around business-to-business and developer-related AI capabilities, AI will also transform how we access information,” comments Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at Nvidia. “Perplexity is at the forefront of this shift as one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs. They will become the go-to place for trusted information, which is why I am so excited that Perplexity is Nvidia's first consumer investment from our corporate arm.”
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