Perplexity Crosses $100 Million in Annualised Revenue

Perplexity, the AI search engine startup has crossed $100 million in annualised revenue. CEO Aravind Srinivas took to a post on LinkedIn to announce the same. He revealed that the company reached the figures 20 months after the launch of Perplexity Pro. He also added that Perplexity has achieved 6.3x year-over-year growth despite being ‘highly under monetised’. 

Perplexity offers a free plan, along with a $20 monthly Pro plan with expanded access to features. Besides, it also offers an enterprise plan that costs $40 per month per seat for companies under 250 employees. Perplexity also allows developers to integrate its Sonar AI models with APIs. 

The company is also reportedly in talks to raise funds between $500 million and $1 billion, valuing the company at $18 billion. 

This doubles Perplexity’s valuation of $9 billion in the previous funding round last December, after raising $500 million. Perplexity has been backed by NVIDIA, SoftBank Group, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. 

The company also made its in-house AI model Sonar available to all Pro users on the platform, along with all the other popular models. Now, users with the Perplexity Pro plan can make Sonar the default model via settings. 

Sonar is built on top of Meta’s open-source Llama 3.3 70B. It is powered by Cerebras Inference, which claims to be the world’s fastest AI inference engine. The model is capable of producing 1200 tokens per second. Earlier, the model was available via API for developers. 

Over the last few months, startups building AI enabled products have showcased remarkable growth with small member teams in quick time. Recently, Cursor, an AI enabled coding platform reached $100 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) in just 21 months since its inception. Its growth from $1 million to $100 million in ARR took just around 12 months, making it the fastest growing SaaS of all time. 

Last year, MidJourney, an AI image generator, reached $200 million in ARR with just 11 employees. Similarly, Bolt.new, another AI coding platform, has crossed $30 million in ARR with just 20 employees, in just a little over 4 months and has registered 3 million users.