Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google, Meta, and other tech giants are exploring ways to integrate GenAI into their operations. At the same time, new businesses are trying to revolutionise AI-powered search. As they cannot directly compete against tech giants, these young startups try to set themselves unique by prioritising a superior user experience.
Attains unicorn status
California-headquartered Perplexity AI is such a company, which aims to reinvent knowledge discovery with an AI-native search engine. The company raised $62.7 million in funding on Wednesday, which brought its valuation to $1.04 billion, making it a unicorn in the Gen AI sector.
Investor and Y Combinator’s ex-head of AI, Daniel Gross, led the round, with participation from Stan Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, and Garry Tan. Other investors include Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and venture capital firms Institutional Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates. This round follows the $73.6 million funding it raised in January this year.
The funding will be used to expand the usage of Perplexity AI among consumers and knowledge workers within enterprises. In addition, the AI startup has partnered with Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank to fuel the distribution of its search engine to 116 million users globally.
“We will use the additional funding to grow our usage across consumers and knowledge workers in enterprises. For consumers: we have inked partnerships with Deutsche Telekom and Softbank to distribute Perplexity to ~116M users worldwide. We earlier announced a similar partnership,” said co-founder at Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas.
Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine
Perplexity AI was founded by former Google researchers Arvind Srinivas, Dennis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski with engineering backgrounds in AI, distributed systems, search engines, and databases. Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, has previous experience at OpenAI.
Comparing Perplexity AI and ChatGPT, the latter works as a language model whereas the former integrates both ChatGPT and the Google search engine. The platform’s AI responds with summaries containing source citations such as websites and articles. Users can ask follow-up questions to delve deeper into a particular topic with Perplexity AI’s search engine.
Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity provides a chatbot-like interface that allows users to ask questions in natural language.
The company has onboarded several launch customers such as Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal Mccann, Paytm, Latham & Watkins, Vercel, Replit, NVIDIA, and HP, spanning the sectors of finance, legal, sports, advertising, software, and hardware.
Perplexity Enterprise Pro, a premium version
The company has a freemium version of its platform where users can find information using their default model. Also, there is a paid version – Perplexity Enterprise Pro, priced at $40/month or $400/year. It includes added features that provide stronger security and data protection such as team member management and deleting queries after seven days.
The company also offers a lower-cost Perplexity Pro version, at $20 per month, which unlocks access to Perplexity Copilot. This opens up access to voice-to-text, unlimited file uploads, unlimited search queries, personal preferences, and image generation capabilities.
Perplexity uses the power of multiple large language models to deliver its results. It includes models developed in-house and external models such as Google’s Gemini, Mistral 7B, Anthropic PBC’s Claude, and OpenAI’s GPT-4. Pro subscribers can select their preferred model when making conversational search queries, allowing for a customised search experience.
Banned by Microsoft
Besides this funding information, Perplexity AI was in the headlines for another reason. Reportedly, Microsoft is blocking its employees from accessing Perplexity AI’s search engine. They received a notification that they could not access the website without any specific information.
In addition to Perplexity AI, access to Google’s Gemini chatbot was also blocked on Microsoft employees’ devices. Previously, the company briefly blocked OpenAI’s ChatGPT from employee devices last year but later said it was by mistake.
