Generative AI Search Startup Perplexity AI Raises $62.7M And Launches Enterprise Platform
Generative AI startup Perplexity AI has raised $62.7 million in a new funding round led by former Y Combinator AI chief Daniel Gross, catapulting its valuation to over $1 billion. Gross was joined by a mix of major names and brands in AI, including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Y combinator CEO Garry Tan, and Figma CEO Dylan Field, among others. Perplexity announced the investment in tandem with the launch of Perplexity Enterprise Pro, the inaugural business-centered foray for the startup’s ‘conversational answer engine.’
Perplexity Unicorn Enterprise
Perplexity’s ChatGPT-style interface is augmented with links to sources in the footnotes. The AI is also designed to be good at remembering conversational context and can suggest related searches to help users refine the hunt for information. The search engine employs a mix of LLMs, including third-party and in-house models. Enterprise Pro aims to cater to the burgeoning demand for enterprise-grade solutions, offering subscriptions at $40 a month. Perplexity has been piloting Enterprise Pro for a few months with select companies, including Stripe, Zoom, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Thrive Global. Perplexity pitches its technology as useful for accelerating research and development, conducting prospect research for sales teams, and other business tasks.
The existing $20 monthly subscription service, Perplexity Pro, already includes additional features like voice-to-text communications, unlimited file uploads, and enhanced search assistance. Perplexity Pro also lets users decide which model to employ. The current menu offers options like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, Mistral 7B, and Google’s Gemini models. With Enterprise Pro, users also get increased data privacy, enhanced security measures, and user management capabilities.
The new funding comes just a few months after a $73.6 million round. Perplexity claims to have 10 million monthly active users and to have processed over half a billion queries in 2023. Established less than two years ago, Perplexity has made waves with its AI chatbot, offering users a unique platform that summarizes search results, provides citations, and assists in refining queries for optimal responses. Perplexity boasts $20 million in annual recurring revenue. Despite its rapid ascent, Perplexity remains smaller in scale and capital compared to industry giants like OpenAI and Google. But with its partnerships like powering the Rabbit r1 generative AI device with real-time internet access and continual upgrades like the ability to answer questions with images and offering a personalized copilot option, Perplexity is in good shape to challenge the biggest names in search and generative AI.
“We will use the additional funding to grow our usage across consumers and knowledge workers in enterprises. For consumers: we have inked partnerships with Deutsche Telekom and Softbank to distribute Perplexity to ~116M users worldwide. We earlier announced a similar partnership with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas explained on LinkedIn. “And for Enterprise: we’ve 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 organization.”
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