Perplexity AI – an artificial intelligence company that is creating a search product to compete with Google – has reportedly closed a $500 million round of funding tripling the company’s valuation to $9 billion, according to sources with Bloomberg and several other news outlets.
Those sources say that this funding round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and it was completed earlier in December. The $9 billion valuation is up from $1 billion as of April 2024. And the valuation increased to $3 billion in June after raising funding from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.
Perplexity is different from AI chatbots as it provides more real-time data. OpenAI also started rolled out search features to users of its chatbot.
Here is what Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on social media today:
Perplexity 2024 Rewind pic.twitter.com/JFXFxXbPkf
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) December 23, 2024
Along with paid and free versions of its search tool, Perplexity runs several services. For example, its product enables companies to search internal files and there are also new finance features such as looking up stock prices and company earnings data. Plus, Perplexity also has revenue sharing agreements with publishers like Fortune and Time.
Earlier this month, Perplexity acquired a data connectivity company called Carbon. Carbon’s data connectors will be integrated into Perplexity’s tech stack, enabling users to connect apps like Notion and Google Docs directly to Perplexity. As part of the acquisition, all the members of the Carbon team will join Perplexity to expedite the roadmap and ship new features faster.
