March thirteenth, 2024: Perplexity AI, a startup based in August 2022, is on a mission to problem Google’s dominance within the search engine market with its AI-powered platform that mixes the performance of a chatbot and a conventional search engine.
The corporate’s speedy progress and progressive method have caught the eye of buyers, together with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested in Perplexity AI by his Bezos Expeditions Fund.
In January, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas introduced that the startup had raised $73.6 million in a funding spherical that included investments from enterprise capitalists, firms like Nvidia, and angel buyers, along with Bezos’ funding.
The spherical valued the corporate at roughly $520 million. Only a few months later, Perplexity AI is finalizing a brand new funding deal that might see its valuation almost double to round $1 billion, in accordance with a report by the Wall Avenue Journal.
Srinivas shared in a weblog publish that Perplexity AI had attracted 10 million month-to-month energetic customers and served over half a billion queries in 2023.
Jonathan Cohen, VP of utilized analysis at Nvidia, praised the startup, stating that it’s “one of many few shopper AI merchandise to succeed in this main milestone of 10 million MAUs.”
Perplexity AI’s search engine affords real-time data and gives footnotes exhibiting the sources of its solutions.
The corporate generates income by providing a Professional model for $20 per 30 days, which permits customers to select from numerous massive language fashions, together with OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, or Perplexity’s personal LLM.
Srinivas has been vocal about his perception that Google’s search engine is outdated and that Perplexity AI represents the way forward for on-line data entry.
“Google goes to be seen as one thing that’s legacy and previous, and Perplexity will likely be seen as one thing that’s the subsequent technology and future,” he instructed Reuters in January.
Regardless of Google’s ongoing efforts to combine AI into its search engine, testing it on hundreds of thousands of customers, Srinivas believes that the tech big lacks the inducement to maneuver rapidly and enhance the product expertise, as its core income comes from customers clicking on hyperlinks and viewing adverts.
As individuals more and more flip to AI chatbots for his or her on-line queries, Srinivas is assured that Perplexity AI’s method will show extra environment friendly and user-friendly.
“The occasions of sifting by web optimization spam, sponsored hyperlinks, and a number of internet pages will likely be changed by a way more environment friendly option to eat and share data,” he wrote within the January announcement.
Whereas Perplexity AI’s potential $1 billion valuation is spectacular, the startup nonetheless faces a major problem in competing with Google, which has huge assets, AI expertise, and a father or mother firm, Alphabet, valued at $1.7 trillion. Nonetheless, Bezos’ funding and the speedy progress of Perplexity AI exhibit