AI search engine firm Perplexity AI bags $62.7M, ventures into enterprise market with $1B valuation

AI search engine firm Perplexity AIhas raised $62.7 million in funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $1.04 billion. Investor and Y Combinator's ex-head of AI, Daniel Gross, led the round, with participation from Stan Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, and Garry Tan.

Other investors include Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and venture capital firms Institutional Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates.

The funds will be used to expand usage among consumers and knowledge workers within enterprises, said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, in a post on X.

In addition, the AI startup has partnered with Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank to fuel the distribution of the search engine to 116 million users globally.

A similar partnership was announced earlier with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February.

In January, the San Fransisco-based firm raised $74 million in funding, reaching a valuation of $540 million.

In a bid to rival with tech giant Google, the AI-based search engine merged AI and chatbot technology to deliver responses to user inquiries using large language models such as GPT-4, Claude 3, and Mistral Large, alongside custom models.

The startup has also introduced Perplexity Enterprise Pro, priced at $40 per month or $400 per year per seat, to provide AI search engine for organisations. Its offerings include SOC2 (system and organisation control), SSO (single sign-on) integration, user management, enterprise-grade data retention, and security warnings.

The company has onboarded several launch customers such as Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal Mccann, Paytm, Latham & Watkins, Vercel, Replit, NVIDIA, and HP, spanning the sectors of finance, legal, sports, advertising, software, and hardware.

"Cleveland is using Perplexity for researching ticket sales trends, HP for crafting compelling sales pitches, Amplitude for better understanding of the market landscape to generate tailormade marketing pitches, and Zoom for focused-searches on Perplexity," the post said.

Founded in 2022 by Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's chatbot-like interface enables users to ask questions to provide summarised information accompanied by source citations.