Perplexity AI is seeking to wrap up its fourth funding spherical this 12 months by elevating over $500 million and tripling its valuation to $9 billion.
The most recent spherical by the AI search startup is led by Institutional Enterprise Companions, a VC agency primarily based out of the San Francisco Bay Space in the US, based on a report by CNBC.
Perplexity has drawn swift curiosity from buyers amid a latest wave of AI-powered serps. For context, the Jeff Bezos-backed startup’s valuation at the start of 2024 was roughly $500 million.
Its app has over 2 million downloads and supplies AI-generated solutions to greater than 230 million search queries monthly.
Search Wars 2.0
A number of main AI firms are dashing to roll out options that use generative AI to offer summarised search outcomes.
Most just lately, OpenAI introduced it has constructed a search function into ChatGPT that permits customers to ask and obtain real-time data of present news occasions. Nevertheless, the function is presently obtainable just for paid customers of ChatGPT.
Equally, Google introduced final week that it was increasing AI Overviews to 100 extra nations. Meta can also be seeking to develop its personal AI search engine to feed its AI chatbot up to date data from the net quite than rely on search indexes maintained by Google or Microsoft Bing, based on a report by The Info.
The controversy round Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI has definitely made waves amongst VC circles, and is taken into account to be a formidable challenger to Google Search. Nevertheless, the startup based by Aravind Srinivas, an IIT Madras graduate, is going through legal threats from publishers comparable to The New York Occasions, Condé Nast, and Dow Jones for allegedly plagiarising content material from the media retailers.
These allegations have been denied by Perplexity, which rolled out a revenue-sharing mannequin for publishers in July. Based mostly on this mannequin, the corporate mentioned it should share a share of the advert income with the writer of the article that has been cited in an AI-generated reply to a search question.
Different AI firms have additionally struck offers with publishers to licence their content material for AI use. For example, Meta and Reuters have a partnership that permits its AI chatbot to “reply to news-related questions with summaries and hyperlinks to Reuters content material.” Google has the same content-licencing association in place with social media platform Reddit.