Perplexity is Building a Claude Code, Cursor Competitor: Report

Perplexity is developing an AI coding tool, marking the startup’s latest move into the increasingly competitive market for AI software engineering assistants currently led by Cursor, Anthropic, and OpenAI, according to a Business Insider report.

Codenamed ‘Teammate’, the company’s engineers have been using the tool since May, according to the report. 

The platform is built to handle long-horizon software engineering tasks, and internal engineers have been using it to find bugs in the company’s systems; it is also said to provide access to multiple AI models. 

AIM reached out to Perplexity for a comment but did not receive a response at the time of publishing.

Founded as an AI-powered search startup, Perplexity has steadily expanded into a broader AI platform with products including its Comet AI browser, enterprise search offerings, shopping features, finance research tools, and APIs. The company was last valued at $20 billion in a funding round completed last year. 

In recent months, the company has introduced Perplexity Computer, an AI agent for executing multi-step workflows, and Brain, a persistent memory system that learns from previous tasks. 

Brain builds a continuously updated context graph, improving answer correctness by 25% and recall by 16%, while reducing costs on history-dependent tasks by 13%. It initially launched in Research Preview for Max and Enterprise Max subscribers. 

In another recent development, Reuters reported that Perplexity will soon adopt NVIDIA's new Vera CPUs for AI agent workloads. 

Nate Kupp, VP for Computer Enterprise and Infrastructure at Perplexity, said the processor was around 1.5 times faster than conventional server CPUs for AI agent coding tasks, making it a good fit for workloads where agents continuously execute and coordinate software tasks. 

In April, the company revealed that its revenue had shot up fivefold, from $100 million to $500 million, as it expanded its team by 34%. It expects to double its revenue again in 2026 while maintaining a relatively small team. 

Perplexity’s annual recurring revenue rose from $16 million to $305 million over the past two years, according to a recent Financial Times report, which also noted that the figure had exceeded $450 million as of March.