Perplexity turns unicorn after raising $62.7 million

CHENNAI: Perplexity, the Aravind Srinivas-led fledgling search engine AI enterprise, on Tuesday, announced that it has raised $62.7 mn from marquee investors at $1.04 billion valuation, earning it the unicorn status under two years. Till date, the fundraising totals to $165 million.

In a LinkedIn post, the entrepreneur said “Excited to announce that we've raised 62.7M$ at 1.04B$ valuation, led by Daniel Gross (former head of AI at Y Combinator), along with Stan Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, Garry Tan, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, IVP, NEA, Jakob Uszkoreit, Naval Ravikant, Brad Gerstner, and Lip-Bu Tan.”

The latest investment led by Gross saw the participation from new investors Stanley Druckenmiller, Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator), Dylan Field (CEO of Figma), Brad Gerstner (Founder & CEO of Altimeter Capital), Laude Capital, Lip-Bu Tan (former CEO of Cadence), and Jakob Uszkoreit (co-inventor of Transformers).

Many of our existing investors, including Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Tobi Lutke, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Naval Ravikant, Andrej Karpathy, IVP, and NEA, also doubled down on their support.

He said the additional funding would be used “to grow our usage across consumers and knowledge workers in enterprises.”

Intimating the consumers about the partnerships the brand has inked with Deutsche Telekom and Softbank, he said this would be to distribute Perplexity to over 116 million users worldwide.

“We earlier announced a similar partnership with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February,” Srinivas added.

As for the enterprise, the entity announced the “launch of Perplexity Enterprise Pro, to bring the world's best AI answer engine into the hands of every knowledge worker in every organisation.”

In the post, he also said “Daniel is a special investor. I really look up to him and his career. He was a founder and worked on a search engine called Cue, and sold the company to Apple, where he ran Spotlight Search and several other projects. He was also the first real beta-tester of http://Perplexity.ai prior to its launch in Dec 2022.”

Perplexity, he affirmed, is looking “forward to continuing to accelerate and grow and to providing accurate knowledge and information to every person on the planet.”

Competing against the Google-dominated Search engine space, the startup raised $74 million in a series B round, recently. A blog post read “Since announcing our Series B funding in January 2024, Perplexity has continued to grow rapidly, now serving 169 million queries per month and cementing our position as the AI-native answer engine of choice.”

The post also elaborated the usecases for enterprises, by noting that “We’ve spent the last few months rolling out Enterprise Pro to select companies across a diverse range of industries including Stripe, Zoom, Bridgewater, Snowflake, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal McCann, Thrive Global, Databricks, Paytm, ElevenLabs, HP, Vercel, and Replit.”

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, confirmed the efficacy of Perplexity Enterprise Pro as it had allowed Databricks “to substantially accelerate R&D, making it easier for our engineering, marketing, and sales teams to execute faster. We estimate it helps our team save 5k working hours monthly."

“Our product changes how people work in ways that companies can’t even imagine yet – today is just the start of our expansion into transforming business,” the post read, where the quoted prices start at $40/month or $400/year per seat.

The blog post also said the new funding would accord global expansion top priority.

“We’ve inked new partnerships with two of the world’s largest telecommunications firms — Japan’s SoftBank Corp. and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom — to market Perplexity's capabilities to consumer and business customers. With a combined user base of more than 335 million customers across mobile and broadband, these partnerships will significantly extend Perplexity’s reach,” it read.

What is Perplexity?

Perplexity is an alternative to traditional search engines, where you can directly pose your questions and receive concise, accurate answers backed up by a curated set of sources. It has a conversational interface, contextual awareness and personalization to learn your interests and preferences over time.

Perplexity’s mission is to make searching for information online feel like you have a knowledgeable assistant guiding you, it is a powerful productivity and knowledge tool that can help you save time and energy with mundane tasks for a multitude of use cases.

How does Perplexity accomplish this?

With the help of our advanced answer engine, it processes your questions and tasks It then uses predictive text capabilities to generate useful responses, choosing the best one from multiple sources, and summarises the results in a concise way.