Perplexity AI Secures $62.7M Funding, Ventures into Enterprise Market with $1B Valuation

• ByStartupStory     |    April 24, 2024

San Francisco-based AI search engine firm, Perplexity AI, has marked a significant milestone with a recent funding round of $62.7 million, propelling the company’s valuation to an impressive $1.04 billion. The funding round was spearheaded by investor and former head of AI at Y Combinator, Daniel Gross, with notable participation from luminaries such as Stan Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, and Garry Tan. Additional support came from tech heavyweights Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and venture capital firms Institutional Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates.

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, expressed the company’s strategic direction following the funding, stating, “The funds will be used to expand usage among consumers and knowledge workers within enterprises.” This expansion is bolstered by partnerships with telecommunications giants Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank, aiming to distribute the AI-powered search engine to a staggering 116 million users globally.

Excited to announce we’ve raised 62.7M$ at 1.04B$ valuation, led by Daniel Gross, along with Stan Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, Garry Tan, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, IVP, NEA, Jakob Uszkoreit, Naval Ravikant, Brad Gerstner, and Lip-Bu… pic.twitter.com/h0a986t4Md

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) April 23, 2024

Earlier collaborations with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February laid the groundwork for Perplexity AI’s ambitious foray into the enterprise market. Notably, in January, the company secured $74 million in funding, achieving a valuation of $540 million.

In a bold move to challenge tech titan Google, Perplexity AI has amalgamated AI and chatbot technologies to offer responses to user queries using advanced language models such as GPT-4, Claude 3, and Mistral Large, alongside custom models. The company has introduced Perplexity Enterprise Pro, priced at $40 per month or $400 per year per seat, catering to organizational needs with features including SOC2 integration, SSO, user management, enterprise-grade data retention, and security protocols.

Traditional search engine is probably the most used enterprise tool, even though it’s not called as one. It’s free, doesn’t go through any IT security, and you pay for it essentially through your data, time and lost attention.

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) April 23, 2024

The company’s impressive client roster spans various sectors including finance, legal, sports, advertising, software, and hardware. Notable launch customers include Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal McCann, Paytm, Latham & Watkins, Vercel, Replit, NVIDIA, and HP, each utilizing Perplexity AI for specific business needs.

“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 tailor-made marketing pitches, and Zoom for focused-searches on Perplexity,” stated a post from the company.

Founded in 2022 by Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI’s user-friendly chatbot interface empowers users to ask questions, receiving concise information accompanied by source citations.

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