Perplexity AI Raises USD 62.7 Mn Funding and Valued at USD 1 Bn Valuation The raised funds will be used to expand usage among consumers and knowledge workers within enterprises.
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Perplexity AI, an AI search engine startup, revealed that it has raised USD 62.7 million in investment, bringing its valuation to USD 1.04 billion. The investment was led by investor and former head of AI at Y Combinator, Daniel Gross, and included participation from Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Stan Druckenmiller, Tobi Lutke, and Garry Tan.
Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and the venture capital firms Institutional Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates are among the other investors.
Prior to this, the business was valued at USD 540 million and raised USD 74 million in January 2024.
According to a post by Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas, the funds will be used to expand usage among consumers and knowledge workers within enterprises.
Furthermore, the AI firm has teamed up with SoftBank and Deutsche Telekom to expand the search engine's global user base to 116 million.
"For consumers, we have inked partnerships with Deutsche Telekom and Softbank to distribute Perplexity to 116 million users worldwide. We earlier announced a similar partnership with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February," posted Srinivas.
Founded in 2022 by Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity is a chatbot-like platform that allows users to ask questions and receive summaries of knowledge with source citations.
The AI-based search engine combined chatbot and AI technologies to offer answers to user queries utilising large language models like GPT-4, Claude 3, and Mistral Large, in addition to custom models, in an attempt to compete with tech giant Google.
Additionally, the business has launched Perplexity Enterprise Pro, an AI search engine for organisations that costs USD 40 per month or USD 400 per seat annually. SOC2 (system and organisation control), user management, enterprise-grade data retention, SSO (single sign-on) integration, and security alerts are some of the services it provides.
"As AI revamps what search is and gets you direct answers, your work hours can be dramatically more productive when you get direct answers. Every knowledge worker is a knowledge seeker, and the tool for seeking knowledge is an accurate answer engine that companies can feel comfortable letting their employees use. That's what Perplexity Enterprise Pro hopes to achieve," posted Srinivas.
In the areas of banking, legal, sports, advertising, software, and hardware, the company has onboarded a number of launch customers, including Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal Mccann, Paytm, Latham & Watkins, Vercel, Replit, NVIDIA, and HP.
"Cleveland is using Perplexity for researching ticket sales trends, HP for crafting compelling sales pitches, Amplitude for better understanding of the market landscape to generate tailormade marketing pitches, and Zoom for focused searches on Perplexity," the post said.
