Perplexity AI nears $500M funding round at $9 billion valuation
Perplexity AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine start-up backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and chipmaker NVIDIA, is on the brink of a major funding round. The company is close to finalizing a $500 million investment at a staggering $9 billion valuation, CNBC reported. The latest development marks a major jump from its $3 billion valuation in June and an even bigger leap from its $500 million valuation at the start of this year.
Institutional Venture Partners leads funding round
The ongoing funding round for Perplexity AI is being led by Institutional Venture Partners, a Bay Area-based firm. The start-up has managed to draw investors this year, amid a wave of interest in generative AI technology, with four funding rounds already under its belt.
Perplexity AI faces competition and controversy
Perplexity AI is not the only player in the game, as it competes with tech giants such as Google and OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Just recently, OpenAI added a search feature to its popular chatbot ChatGPT. The new feature offers real-time sports scores, stock quotes, news updates, weather forecasts among other services. However, Perplexity AI has also been accused of content plagiarism by media outlets like The New York Times.
Perplexity AI's response to plagiarism allegations
Responding to the plagiarism allegations, Perplexity AI has denied any wrongdoing. The company had introduced a revenue-sharing model for publishers in July. Under this scheme, whenever a user's query generates ad revenue by citing an article in its response, Perplexity shares a portion of that revenue with the original publisher. Several media outlets and content platforms have already joined this "Publishers Program."
Perplexity AI's growth and future plans
Perplexity AI's app has been downloaded over two million times and processes over 230 million queries every month. The number of US-based queries has grown eightfold in the last year. The company's Chief Business Officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, disclosed plans to enroll 30 publishers by year-end into their revenue-sharing scheme. This would further grow their user base and improve their service offerings.
