NVIDIA in Talks to Invest in Perplexity at $30 Bn Plus Valuation: Report

NVIDIA is in discussions to invest in Perplexity AI as part of a multibillion-dollar funding round that would value the AI startup at more than $30 billion, according to a report by The Information.

The proposed valuation would represent an increase of more than 50% from Perplexity’s last financing, which valued the company at $20 billion in 2025. The talks come as Perplexity’s annualised revenue has surged to more than $750 million, up from less than $250 million at the start of the year.

A significant part of that growth has come from Perplexity Computer, an AI agent that can automate computer-based tasks for professionals. The product has expanded Perplexity beyond its original AI-powered search engine and into the growing market for agentic software.

The proposed equity investment reportedly follows earlier discussions in which NVIDIA considered paying Perplexity billions of dollars to license some of its technology and hire some of its employees.

The talks are notable because NVIDIA has recently pursued similar arrangements with AI startups as it expands beyond GPUs and works to strengthen its own AI software and model efforts.

Last week, NVIDIA agreed to pay $6 billion to license AI model-development software from Poolside and planned to offer jobs to 109 of the startup’s employees, according to The Wall Street Journal. NVIDIA is also investing $1 billion in Poolside at a $12 billion pre-money valuation.

NVIDIA has struck similar licensing and hiring deals with AI inference chip startup Groq and networking company Enfabrica over the past year.  

Perplexity has said it plans to use NVIDIA’s Vera CPUs to run agentic AI queries. NVIDIA launched Vera in March as a processor built specifically for agentic AI workloads, including inference, reinforcement learning and data processing.

Perplexity also entered a multiyear agreement with NVIDIA-backed CoreWeave in March to run its AI inference workloads on CoreWeave’s cloud infrastructure.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has also said he uses Perplexity as his go-to chatbot. 

NVIDIA has already invested in Perplexity multiple times, with the startup raising more than $1.7 billion from NVIDIA and other investors including New Enterprise Associates, Accel and SoftBank Group.

The new funding could give Perplexity more capital to expand ahead of a potential public listing. CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC in June that Perplexity plans to go public in 2028 regardless of how the IPOs of AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic perform.

Perplexity has also expanded beyond search. Alongside its core search product and Perplexity Computer, it provides access to both open-source and proprietary AI models developed by other companies. The startup does not train its own foundation models from scratch; instead, it routes queries to different models depending on the task.