Perplexity AI today raised $63M at a $1B valuation, led by Daniel Gross and others, including Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, to fuel its global expansion, alongside enhancing its AI-driven search capabilities, and disrupt the traditional search market with its conversational AI service. 

The round also saw Stanley Druckenmiller, Tobi Lutke, Garry Tan, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, IVP, NEA, Jakob Uszkoreit, Naval Ravikant, Brad Gerstner and Lip-Bu Tan among others. 

With the latest funding, Perplexity AI looks to support the development and rollout of new offerings like Enterprise Pro (also announced today). The new offering aims to enhance security and privacy features for business environments. 

The company said that since it announced its Series B in January this year, it has grown to serve 169 million queries per month and more than 1 billion queries in the last 15 months. It now looks to use the additional funding further to grow its consumer adoption alongside enterprise expansion. 

In addition, Perplexity AI has partnered with telecommunications firms like SoftBank (Japan) and Deutsche Telekom (Germany) to distribute Perplexity to a combined total of over 116 million users. Previously, it partnered with Korea’s largest telecommunications company, SK Telecoms, where 32M+ subscribers can access Perplexity Pro. 

Perplexity AI was founded in August 2022 by former Google AI colleagues frustrated with the challenges of accessing and utilising large language models. The co-founders include Andy Konwinski, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, and Johnny Ho. So far, the company has raised $163 million in funding, valuing the company at $1 billion. 

Perplexity AI, Everyone’s Favourite  

Even NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang previously mentioned that he uses Perplexity, a company they have invested in, ‘almost everyday’. 

The testimonials of big tech leaders such as Huang and Bezos may sound inflated considering they have invested in the AI company, but going by the growing number of Perplexity users, the company is surely capturing a wide audience. 

The company has well over 10 million monthly users– and counting. 

Further, they even offer models in various languages, such as Korean, German, French, and Spanish. 

Recently, its founder, Srinivas even met the co-founder of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, aka the CTO of India, and also was seen twinning with Jensen. 

Google Alternative? 

Google chief Sundar Pichai seems to care less. But, the AI-powered answer engine has definitely been in a quest to establish itself as a Google alternative. In the process, the company is leaving no stone unturned; it is actively partnering with device-makers, including Nothing, Rabbit R1, and others. 

Recently, Perplexity also partnered with Yelp to improve local searches and help users find information on local restaurants and businesses, a probable step to combat Google reviews. 

Perplexity recently incorporated DataBricks’ latest open-source LLM DBRX, which is said to outperform GPT-4 and other powerful AI models like LLaMA and Mistral. 

Source: X

Not just Databricks, Perplexity has been open to embracing and offering closed-source models through APIs and answer engines, be it the latest Claude 3 Opus, Mistral Large, Google Gemma, or the latest entrant Llama 3. Perplexity is quick at its game.

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO and co-founder, recently announced that Copy AI, which is launching a GTM platform, is collaborating with Perplexity AI. “They chose to use our APIs for this, and we’re also providing six months of Perplexity Pro for free to current Copy AI subscribers,” he said.