Perplexity Raises $73.6M in Series B, Reaches Milestones in AI & Search Engine Space
Summary:
AI startup Perplexity has announced the successful completion of its Series B funding round, raising $73.6 million. The investment was led by IVP, with contribution from existing and new investors, including NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos. The company also reported reaching significant milestones, with 10 million active users and half a billion queries served in 2023 alone. Despite being recently founded in 2022, Perplexity's potential in search engine and AI sectors is attracting attention from numerous analysts, as large tech companies focus increasingly on AI-based interfaces and chatbot tech.
In the latest developments on January 4, artificial intelligence enterprise Perplexity made public a series of achievements and updates. The significant news revolves around the successful conclusion of their Series B funding round, which amassed $73.6 million. The funding round was championed by lead investor IVP, known for backing numerous cryptocurrency and fintech companies like Coinbase and Robinhood. Other investors from the Series A stage, including NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, participated, along with new investments from NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos, coming from the Bezos Expeditions Fund. Based on a report by Kyle Wiggers from TechCrunch, the Series B funding valuation was at a whopping $520 million. Up to the present, the total funding for Perplexity has reached $100 million.
Perplexity further broadcasted that it has hit numerous critical targets ever since its advancement: "Apart from cultivating 10 million monthly users, we've also catered to more than half a billion searches in 2023. Additionally, our mobile applications have been downloaded by over a million users, compatible with both iOS and Android systems." Even though Perplexity might not be one of the well-known entities in the search engine and AI domains, its swift progress from establishment to the current valuation close to half a billion dollars (the firm was set up in 2022) along with its experienced management team has drawn attention from several analysts. Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the firm, had internships with DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI, prior to taking on a position as a research scientist at OpenAI. According to their LinkedIn profiles, the company's CTO, Denis Yarats, was affiliated with Facebook and Microsoft.
The foray of Perplexity into the search engine and AI sectors happens at a time when major tech firms are predicting that chatbot technology will dominate both these sectors. Both Google and Microsoft have made a shift to AI-first interfaces for their key search products, Search and Bing, respectively. Forecasts suggest that the value of the AI sector alone could escalate as high as $667 billion by 2030. Perplexity differentiates from major tech entities in its selection process as users can choose to summarise search results and generate outputs using Perplexity’s in-house developed AI models or from other widely acclaimed models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, even though there are perceptible similarities as well. Perplexity, like Microsoft, offers an AI assistant by the name of Copilot. Even though the two AI tools are not directly linked, they appear to be operationally akin.
Published At
1/4/2024 8:44:04 PM
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