Inside Perplexity AI: From 2022 to Now Into a $28 million business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: San Francisco, USA
Current Status: Active (private; considered a top AI startup to watch)
Founders: Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, others
Founded Year: 2022
Investors: New Enterprise Associates, Databricks Ventures, Y Combinator
Funding Raised: $28 million
What Is the business model of Perplexity AI?
AI-powered search engine and chatbot interface that provides direct answers and summaries to user queries, using large language models and citing sources; likely to monetize via ads or subscriptions in the future
How Perplexity AI got started?
Founded in 2022 by AI researchers to rethink search with a conversational answer engine, quickly gained traction as a free web and mobile app that combines AI-generated answers with source citations, positioning itself as a “Google with GPT-3” experience
what growth strategy has Perplexity AI followed?
Rapidly grew a user base by offering advanced GPT-style answers to any question for free, capitalizing on the hype around generative AI in 2023, the app’s fast, cited answers spurred word-of-mouth and an $8M Series A, making it one of the buzzy AI startups of 2023
what are the top products/features of Perplexity AI
Perplexity Ask AI search app, Perplexity mobile app, conversational AI answers with source citations
what was the biggest challenge faced by Perplexity AI?
Must compete with tech giants integrating similar AI into their search (e.g. Bing with ChatGPT) on limited resources, and faces the challenge of ensuring answer accuracy and handling the high compute costs of AI inference as usage scales