The funding received will take the total valuation of Perplexity AI, which is a notable early stage company in the AI powered internet search engine segment, to a staggering $9 billion. This round is also joined by IVP, a well-known old venture capital firm from the Bay area. In the past year itself, the venture has been growing at a remarkable rate especially owing to the fact there are already established players in the field such as Google and ChatGPT by OpenAI.
Towards the end of 2022, the valuation of Perplexity was pegged at about $500 million, which was, however, a conservative estimate given the bullish sentiments over the generative AI technologies. Four funding rounds have thus far been raised by the company in the year 2024, increasing its market value even more.
The startup has received praise for its one-of-a-kind innovative AI search features that allows users to carry out search tasks in a more engaging, interactive and talking manner as compared to the usual search engines. This upsurge in popularity is however coming in a less favorable environment as the competition has become healthier, especially with the entry of OpenAI that within a short time has incorporated a search engine within ChatGPT to compete with Perplexity and other search engines including Google and Bing majority owned by Microsoft.
Although it’s been successful, Perplexity AI has encountered the issue of content scraping. In October, the newspaper ordered the company to restrain from using its articles after accusing it of generating responses based on its owned articles. These allegations however have been refuted by Perplexity, and on the deal made with them the corporation created a program that compensated publishers in the month of July. Under this policy, when reference material is produced that contains articles from content makers, the company pays them a portion of the advertisement income that they earn, which is meant to tackle the issue of copyright concerns, thus encouraging content development.
The startup’s app has been downloaded over 2 million times and currently processes more than 230 million queries per month, with U.S. query volume experiencing an eightfold increase over the past year. As part of its continued growth strategy, Perplexity plans to expand its publisher partnerships to 30 by the end of 2024. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the company’s ongoing funding round.
