Perplexity AI is in early talks to carry between $500 million and $1 billion in funding at an $18 billion post-money valuation, a provide acquainted with the state of affairs knowledgeable .
The new funding would double the unreal intelligence startup’s most recent valuation. Perplexity has barely under $100 million in annual recurring earnings, or ARR, based mostly on the provision, who requested to remain anonymous due to the confidential nature of the talks.
The AI search engine agency competes in opposition to the likes of Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Its valuation in December was $9 billion, triple its $3 billion valuation in June 2024.
Perplexity has been within the midst of the generative AI development that began in late 2022 with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, nevertheless it faces rising opponents inside the AI search market.
Earlier on Thursday, Anthropic launched its internet search product, allowing its chatbot Claude to point out real-time search outcomes to a subset of consumers. And remaining fall, OpenAI launched a search attribute inside ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positioned it to larger compete with Perplexity, along with major serps like Google and Microsoft’s Bing. Google has launched AI Overviews inside its search product as successfully, though it sparked controversy over high-profile errors shortly after its launch.
Bloomberg was first to report on Perplexity’s funding talks.
reported remaining month that Perplexity was close to elevating a $50 million enterprise fund focused on early-stage AI startups. The agency may be an anchor investor inside the fund, nevertheless a number of the capital is coming from outside restricted companions, based mostly on a person acquainted with the matter who spoke with on the time.
Perplexity sees a potential investing profit referring to startups on account of roughly 80,000 builders are plugged into its group, the actual particular person knowledgeable on the time. That supplies the startup visibility into who’s using its software program programming interface, or API, and who’s most energetic of their consumption. Perplexity’s founders and merchants are putting money into the fund, and some of the agency’s dedication is inside the kind of stock, the provision said.
The startup moreover made a bid in January to merge with TikTookay as a result of the social media platform’s future inside the U.S. stays in limbo.
Despite the AI development, Perplexity has been embroiled in controversy due to accusations of plagiarizing content material materials from media retailers. Perplexity debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers in July. Any time a client asks a question and Perplexity generates advert earnings from citing an article in its reply, Perplexity will share a share of that earnings with the author, the company said on the time.
WATCH: How to make DeepSeek and TikTookay American: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas explains
