- Perplexity AI announced it has raised $25.6 million.
Perplexity AI – a conversational AI-powered answer engine at the leading edge of results accuracy and transparency – announced the launch of an iOS application and $25.6 million in Series A financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Databricks Ventures and existing angel investors Elad Gil (co-founder Mixer Labs/Color Health), Nat Friedman (former CEO of GitHub) and Bob Muglia (former CEO of Snowflake and President of Microsoft) and Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail). The prior investors include Yann LeCun (VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta), Andrej Karpathy (founding member OpenAI & former Head of Tesla AI), Amjad Masad (Founder and CEO of Replit), Oriol Vinyals (VP of Research, DeepMind), and Clem Delangue (Founder, CEO of HuggingFace) among others.
The company has seen significant momentum in its web product offerings, consistently growing about 100% month-over-month with 10 million monthly visits and 2 million unique visitors in February alone. Previously available through the company’s website and as an extension on the Chrome Web Store, the new iOS application enables Perplexity to introduce new features like user sign-in for personalization, persistent search history, and social sharing.
Launched last year by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity AI was inspired by the founders’ academic backgrounds in scientific research and question-answering. And the founders previously held positions at OpenAI, Meta, Quora, Bing, and Databricks, which inspires Perplexity AI’s core offering of clear citations alongside searches. The funds from the Series A round will be used for fueling Perplexity AI’s growth and expansion plans, including developments on user sign-in, optimizing the application’s knowledge database, and continuing to protect user privacy.
KEY QUOTES:
“We have built a first-of-its-kind conversational answer engine that is grounded in providing accurate and relevant information through citations. This is a first step in our mission of building the world’s most transparent information service and maximizing the knowledge and productivity of the average consumer. When people search online for answers to their questions, they are presented with endless lists of links that can be manipulated by advertisers and search engine optimization. Individuals are then tasked with sifting through those websites and distilling the information, much of which may not be accurate in the first place. With Perplexity AI, we aspire to fix all of that.”
— Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder and CEO, Perplexity AI
“Finding truth in the noise was already a daunting task, and the extraordinary potential of generative AI comes with a host of new challenges. With AI-generated content set to proliferate exponentially over the coming months and years, there has never been a more urgent need for quality over quantity. In less than a year, the founding team at Perplexity AI has developed a transparent, trusted and delightfully simple service that advances the way people consume and share knowledge. We’re excited to partner with Aravind and the team as they continue to build out the product and accelerate growth.”
— Peter Sonsini, general partner at NEA who joins Perplexity AI’s board in conjunction with the financing
