March 13, 2024: Perplexity AI, a startup founded in August 2022, goals to challenge Google's dominance within the search engine market with its AI-powered platform that mixes the functionality of a chatbot and a standard search engine.
The company's rapid growth and revolutionary approach have caught the eye of investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested in Perplexity AI through his Bezos Expeditions Fund.
In January, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, announced that the startup had raised $73.6 million in a funding round that included Bezos' investment, in addition to investments from enterprise capitalists, corporations like Nvidia, and angel investors.
The round valued the corporate at around $520 million. Just a couple of months later, Perplexity AI closed a brand new financing deal that increased its value, in response to a report by Wall Street Journal.
Srinivas said in a blog post that by 2023, Perplexity AI may have attracted 10 million monthly energetic users and processed over half a billion queries.
Jonathan Cohen, Vice President of Applied Research at Nvidiapraised the startup, saying it was “considered one of the few consumer AI products to achieve this necessary milestone of 10 million MAUs.”
Perplexity AI's search engine provides information in real time and adds footnotes with the sources of its answers.
The company generates revenue by offering a Pro version for $20 per thirty days, where users can select from several major language models, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, or Perplexity's LLM.
Srinivas has openly expressed his belief that Google's search engine is outdated and that Perplexity AI represents the long run of online information access.
“Google shall be seen as something old and outdated, and Perplexity shall be seen as something next generation and of the long run,” he told Reuters in January.
Despite Google's ongoing efforts to integrate AI into its search engine and test it on hundreds of thousands of users, Srinivas believes the tech giant is lacking the Incentive to act quickly and improve the product experiencesince the most important revenue comes from users clicking on links and viewing ads.
As more people turn to AI chatbots for his or her online queries, Srinivas believes Perplexity AI's approach will prove more efficient and user-friendly.
“The days of getting to sift through web optimization spam, sponsored links and multiple web pages shall be replaced by a rather more efficient approach to devour and share information,” he wrote within the January announcement.
While Perplexity AI's potential $1 billion valuation is impressive, the startup still faces a major challenge competing with Google, which has vast resources, AI talent, and a parent company. Alphabet valued at $1.7 trillionNevertheless, Bezos' investment and the rapid growth of Perplexity AI
