Aravind Srinivas-led Perplexity AI Raises $73.6 Mn In Series B; Jeff Bezos, Nvidia Among Investors
Perplexity AI has raised USD 73.6 million in a recent funding round. The round, spearheaded by venture capital firm IVP, boasts participation from prominent investors such as Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. According to the company, this funding round has propelled Perplexity AI's valuation to approximately USD 520 million.
Led by Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI specialises in AI-powered search tools, utilising a range of large language models (LLMs), including those from OpenAI and Meta's open-source model Llama. Their search capabilities offer users instant answers to queries, complete with sources and citations. The startup had previously secured USD 25.6 million in March of the preceding year in a funding round led by NEA.
“IVP led the round with continued support from our Seed and Series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds, and Kindred Ventures, among others,” mentioned Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas in his blog.
The company, based in San Francisco, has experienced rapid growth, handling over 500 million queries in 2023, all while maintaining modest marketing expenses. Despite its success, Perplexity AI has yet to turn a profit, generating single-digit million revenue annually. However, with the recent injection of funds, the startup plans to scale its operations by hiring additional staff and advancing its product development efforts.
As of now, Perplexity AI employs 38 people, and its ambitious plans include reaching a headcount of around 60 employees by the end of the current year. The startup's website and mobile web witnessed a surge in popularity, with 45 million visits in December, marking a substantial increase from the 2.2 million visits recorded when the service initially launched in December 2022, according to Similarweb data.
"While there has been a lot of excitement around business-to-business and developer-related AI capabilities, AI will also transform how we access information. Perplexity is at the forefront of this shift as one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs. They will become the go-to place for trusted information, which is why I am so excited that Perplexity is NVIDIA’s first consumer investment from our corporate arm," Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at NVIDIA said in a statement.
Despite its impressive growth trajectory, Perplexity AI faces formidable competition in the online search market, where Google commands a dominant 90 per cent market share.
