The AI search engine Perplexity, led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, has raised $500 million in a new round of financing, tripling its valuation to $9 billion. The list of investors is also impressive.
Perplexity has raised $500 million in fresh capital. As the Financial Times reports , venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners led the fourth round of financing, which also included Nvidia , New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price.
The company, led by former OpenAI scientist Aravind Srinivas (30), which is actively used by 15 million people every month, has grown rapidly this year and is in a tough and increasingly expensive competition with competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for customers and talent.
However, the market to be won is also huge, which is why investors continue to invest billions in AI companies. And apparently Perplexity has recently been flooded with financing offers. In previous rounds, the Vision Fund 2 of the Japanese SoftBank,
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (60), OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy (38) and Meta’s AI chief scientist Yann LeCun (64) also invested in Perplexity.
Most recently, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October, Anthropic raised $4 billion from Amazon alone in November. Elon Musk ‘s (53) xAI announced $6 billion in December, and Databricks yesterday raised $10 billion, pushing the AI platform’s valuation up to a whopping $62 billion.
Perplexity: Looking for further monetization opportunities
So far, Perplexity has earned its money from subscriptions. And according to the FT, it has increased its estimated annual revenue – an extrapolation of the entire year’s revenue based on the last month’s revenue – from $5 million in January to $35 million in August. According to media reports, this figure is set to rise to $127 million by 2025 and then to $656 million by the end of 2026. So far, however, this has come at an immense cost.
Accordingly, Perplexity, like other AI start-ups, is desperately looking for additional monetization opportunities, such as advertising, where marketers bid for the placement of a sponsored link in search queries.
At the same time, Perplexity is constantly working on improving its AI search. According to a report by the US portal
“The Information”, it recently acquired the US start-up Carbon. Its software makes it possible to supply large language models with data from a range of different third-party applications, such as productivity applications such as Google Workspace.
