The start-up Perplexity is working hard to find the path to profitability. At the beginning of January, it raised $73.6 million in a funding round led by the investment company IVP and with the participation of Nvidia, NEA, Bessemer, Elad Gil, Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Databricks, Tobi Lutke, Guillermo Rauch, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan. Today, the startup is announcing an additional $62.7 million in funding.
The new investment was led by Daniel Gross (former head of AI at Y Combinator) joined by incoming investors – Stanley Druckenmiller, Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator), Dylan Field (CEO of Figma), Brad Gerstner (founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital), Laude Capital, Lip-Bu Tan (former CEO of Cadence) and Jakob Uszkoreit (co-inventor of Transformers). Many current investors have also doubled their support, specifies the start-up.
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Perplexity joins the upper echelon of unicorns
This round doubles the company's total valuation to over $1 billion and brings the total amount of funds raised to $165 million. “Since announcing our Series B funding in January 2024, Perplexity has continued to grow rapidly, now serving 169 million queries per month and cementing our position as the AI native response engine of choice,” would like to remind Perplexity.
“With this funding, global expansion is a top priority”, adds the company. The young company has thus concluded partnerships with two large telecommunications companies – SoftBank in Japan and Deutsche Telekom in Germany – to distribute Perplexity to consumers and businesses. Through these partnerships, the start-up targets a combined user base of more than 335 million mobile and broadband customers.
An offer already adopted by databricks, snowflake and zoom
At the same time, the start-up is launching Perplexity Enterprise Pro, its first offering for businesses. Boasting of use of its services by “millions of people”So Perplexity has spent the last few months deploying Enterprise Pro to select companies across a wide range of industries, including Bridgewater, Cleveland Cavaliers, Databricks, ElevenLabs, HP, Paytm, Replit, Snowflake, Stripe, Thrive Global, Universal McCann, Vercel and Zoom.
Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, affirms that the firm relied on this professional offering to “Dramatically speed up R&D, allowing our engineering, marketing and sales teams to work faster. We estimate it saves our team 5,000 man hours per month.”
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For their part, Zoom's product teams use Perplexity's Focus feature for targeted research while HP's sales teams use the tool to perform quick, in-depth prospect research to accelerate the sales process. The Cleveland Cavaliers' data teams study ticket sales trends and explore partnerships.
A paid offer at 40 dollars per month
For the record, Perplexity's answer engine crawls the internet in real time and provides complete, verifiable answers with quotes, as well as multimedia answers including graphics, videos, and images to provide more context. Instead of searching for an answer and having to navigate multiple websites to find the right answer, Perplexity is banking on its service's ability to streamline employees' workflow and ultimately help them save time.
The paid offer – available from $40/month or $400/year per seat (rate for companies with fewer than 250 employees) – offers additional functions. This includes voice-to-text conversion, unlimited file uploads, and unlimited search-assisted queries to refine user questions. Perplexity also promises to emphasize security.
This includes user management, data retention (this is deleted after 7 days), setting up alerts on new file downloads to keep documents under control as well as increased data confidentiality. “Your data remains yours, period. We never train our LLMs on our clients’ data.”
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