Perplexity
Ask a question and inspect the web sources behind the answer.
Perplexity Funding History
Perplexity is a US AI company that operates the Perplexity answer engine and Comet browser and develops the Sonar search-augmented models.
Company Overview
Founded 2022 · San Francisco, California
Official WebsitePerplexity Funding Timeline
Funding Round
US$200 million
The financing was reported separately from a July investment, which had itself extended an earlier round.
Source · techcrunch.com ↗Funding Round
US$500 million
Around the time the financing was reported, Perplexity announced it had acquired Carbon, whose tools connect language models to external data sources.
Led by IVP.
Source · siliconangle.com ↗Strategic Investment
US$10 million
SK Telecom announced the investment as part of a search partnership and planned to offer Perplexity Pro to its customers.
Participation included SK Telecom.
Source · telecomstechnews.com ↗Series B
US$73.6 million
Perplexity reported more than half a billion queries in 2023 when it announced the financing.
Led by IVP. Participation included NVIDIA, NEA, Bessemer, Elad Gil, Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Databricks, Guillermo Rauch, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasin.
Source · lw.com ↗Series A
US$25.6 million
The financing coincided with the launch of Perplexity’s iOS app for its conversational answer engine.
Led by NEA.
Source · perplexity.ai ↗Series B Extension
US$250 million
Bloomberg reported that SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 was investing as part of a larger financing for Perplexity’s AI search business.
Participation included SoftBank.
Source · news.bloomberglaw.com ↗
Perplexity Founding Team
Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats brought AI research experience from OpenAI and Meta to Perplexity. They started the company with Johnny Ho, who had worked on engineering at Quora, and Andy Konwinski, who had helped build Databricks.
Perplexity Company Development
Search Moves into the Browser and the API
Perplexity first built a consumer answer engine around web retrieval and citations. Comet moved that assistant into the browser, while the Search API let developers add retrieval to their own applications.
Perplexity Competitive Landscape
Answer Engines and General-Purpose Assistants
Perplexity and ChatGPT overlap when a user asks a question that needs web research. Perplexity puts sources and web retrieval at the center of the answer experience. ChatGPT also supports broader workflows such as working with documents and code, which can matter once the answer becomes part of a project.
