CHENNAI:
Perplexity AI
, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based search company co-founded by the IIT-Madras alumnus
Arvind Srinivas
and others, has raised $62.7 million funding in a round led by leading
AI
investor and former Y-Combinator partner
Daniel Gross
along with prominent figures like Stan Druckenmiller, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify and others.
This puts the total valuation of the startup at $1.4 billion. Earlier, the company raised $74 million in January 2024 and was valued at $540 million.
“The additional funding will be used to increase our usage across consumers and knowledge workers in enterprises,” Arvind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said in a post on X.
“For consumers, we have inked partnerships with Deutsche Telekom and Softbank to distribute Perplexity to 116M users worldwide. We earlier announced a similar partnership with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February.”
The startup has recently launched Perplexity Enterprise Pro, targeting enterprise customers and competing with Google’s Gemini Enterprise and OpenAI’s GPT-4, Microsoft Co-pilot. It has added Databricks, Zoom,
NVIDIA
and HP as customers.
“As AI revamps what search is and gets you direct answers, your work hours can be dramatically more productive when you get direct answers. Every knowledge worker is a knowledge seeker, and the tool for seeking knowledge is an accurate answer engine that companies can feel comfortable letting their employees use. That's what Perplexity Enterprise Pro hopes to achieve,” he posted.
Perplexity, headquartered in California, US, was founded in 2022 by Arvind Srinivas, Andy Konwinsky, Dennis Yarats and Johnny Ho. It soon became a hit with its AI-based search offering and endorsement from prominent tech figures.
English (US) ·