Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, has secured $500 million in funding, increasing its valuation to $9 billion. The funding round will be used to compete with Google and OpenAI, particularly in attracting top AI talent. Perplexity plans to improve on Google's search advertising system and is exploring partnerships with major brands. The company is experiencing rapid growth with hundreds of millions of monthly queries and 15 million active users, primarily in the US.
Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-driven search engine , has closed its fourth funding round this year, tripling its valuation to $9bn as it seeks to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI. The $500mn round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.
Previous investors have included SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as several prominent names from the AI industry such as OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. The San Francisco-based group has grown rapidly this year, with its product receiving hundreds of millions of queries a month. It has 15mn monthly active users with most of that traffic coming from the US. The new funding will help Perplexity compete with west coast rivals in an increasingly fierce fight for engineers. “The talent war for AI is like no other time before,” according to Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks, the AI and data analytics company that announced a $10bn fundraising round on Tuesday. Perplexity is seeking to capitalise and improve on the search advertising system pioneered by Google, in which marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries. It is in talks with major brands to pilot advertising on its platform. In a sign of growing competition in the space, AI companies have recently targeted the search market by linking up chatbots to the internet. This week, OpenAI rolled out web searching for its popular ChatGPT product, while Anthropic’s Claude can perform searches through a feature called “computer use”. Google and Microsoft, which are leaders in the $300bn digital advertising world, have also recently incorporated large language models, which power AI chatbots and make results more conversational, into their search offering
Artificial Intelligence Search Engine Funding Competition Digital Advertising
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