Last January 4th Perplexity AIa startup with fewer than forty employees based in a San Francisco coworking space, announced the closing of a $73.6 million round led by IVP, NEA, Databricks Ventures, former Twitter VP Elad Gil, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel.
Other investors also participated in the financing, including Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The main goal is to enhance the technology behind its search engine to challenge the two web giants operating in the same sector: Google and Bing.
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According to the CEO Aravind Srinivas who founded the startup in 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity’s advantage “lies in using generative AI to provide direct answers rather than summaries or links to websites with the requested information”.
This is the secret that allowed the startup to register – at the end of November 2023 – 53 million visits between website and app. A huge leap forward, if we think that at the launch date, December 2022, there were just 2.2 million users.
To date Perplexity is a search engine startup used by 10 million users per monthwith a value equal to 520 million dollars, and if it is true that a round of 73 million dollars may seem like a small sum by American standards, it is equally true that this is the highest sum raised in recent years by a company active in web search engines. Among other things, the capital also includes some former Alphabet executives, such as the former CEO of Youtube Susan Wojcicki.
How Perplexity works
More than a generative AI capable of producing creative texts and images – starting from a textual description – like ChatGptPerplexity proposes itself as a tool that can simplify online searches, providing direct answers rather than links to websites. “If you can answer someone’s question directly, no one needs those ten extra blue links,” said CEO Srinivas.
Perplexity offers its users the possibility of being used for free and you don’t even need to create your own account or subscribe a Pro subscription for $20. With this subscription, users can access several language models available in the market. Among them are OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, Google’s Gemini.
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Il Wall Street Journal reports that the startup has an annual turnover between 5 and 10 million dollarsthanks to subscriptions and the sale of its artificial intelligence software.
Perplexity’s mission is to provide “real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of answers.”
Not only. To retain users, the startup has been enriched with new functions for a few months, such as the ability to see which are the most popular searches on the platform (Discovery) and allows you to organize search threads into customized categories, with public sharing options or private (Collections).
Furthermore you can also upload files of any type, from PDF and CSV to images, and explore their contents with questions using GPT-4. Some of these options are available for free, while others are reserved for Pro users, who have unlimited requests to the assistant Copilotthey can upload documents, images and other files, and even select their preferred AI model between GPT-4 and Claude, for best results.
And in the meantime the company is letting it be known that more than one million users have downloaded its mobile application.