Confusion also raised $520 million in a $73M Series B round for the AI-powered search engine.
Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity announced a series of development milestones and updates on January 4. Rounding out the news is the company's successful Series B round, which raised $73.6 million.
The fundraiser was led by IVP, whose investment portfolio includes several crypto and fintech companies such as Coinbase and Robinhood. They are joined by Series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Databricks. It also featured new investments from Nvidia and Jeff Bezos (via the Bezos Travel Fund).
TechCrunch reports that the Series B fundraising is valued at $520 million. According to Perplexity, it has currently raised $100 million.
We are pleased to announce the raising of $73.6 million in Series B funding led by IVP, with participation from NVIDIA, NEA, Bessemer, Elad Gil, Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Databricks, Tobi Lutke, Guillermo Rauch, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan. . pic.twitter.com/7ROQz347L3
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) January 4, 2024
The company has also announced that it has reached several key milestones since its inception.
“We've grown to 10 million monthly active users and served more than half a billion requests by 2023. More than one million people have installed our mobile app on iOS and Android.”
While Confusion may be one of the most prominent players in the search engine and generative artificial intelligence (AI) spaces, its relatively quick turnaround from startup to half-billion dollar valuation (the company was founded less than two years ago, in 2022) and its leadership team is pedigree. Phrases have caught many commentators' attention.
The company's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, previously worked at DeepMind, Google and OpenAI before working as a research scientist at OpenAI. Dennis Yarat, Perplexity's chief technology officer, previously worked at Facebook and Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn page.
Related: Microsoft to add AI Copilot key in first Windows keyboard update in 30 years
Confusion's entry into the search and generative AI spaces comes as Big Tech is betting on chatbot technology to dominate both sectors. Google and Microsoft have moved to AI-first interfaces for both their main search products, Search and Bing, respectively, and analysts predict that the generative AI sector alone could reach $667 billion by 2030.
Perplexity differs from Big Tech's offerings in its selection — users can aggregate search results and generate results using Perplexity's in-house AI models, or choose from among the most popular, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini. However, there are also striking similarities.
Like Microsoft, Perplexity offers an AI assistant called Copilot. Although the two products may seem unrelated, they are functionally similar.
