Perplexity an Artificial Intelligence (A.I) powered search engine raised $26 Million for its product innovation and launching an iOS app.
Built by Engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity was formed in 2022.
Srinivas worked as an intern at DeepMind and Google before joining OpenAI as an AI researcher, while Yarats spent several years as a staff machine learning engineer at Quora. Ho was a Quora developer who later became a quantitative trader, and Konwinski was a member of the Databricks founding team.
With involvement from Databricks Ventures, angel investors including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Meta’s head scientist Yann LeCun, and New Enterprise Associates, Perplexity AI, which defines itself as a “conversational search engine,” closed a Series A investment round. The new payment comes as Perplexity reports having received 2 million unique visitors in February alone, in addition to 10 million monthly visits.
In contrast to a standard search engine, Perplexity provides a chatbot-like user interface that enables users to ask questions in normal language, to which its AI then replies by citing websites and sources from around the internet. Perplexity will react to users’ follow-up inquiries based on the context of its prior responses, allowing them to delve deeper into a particular issue.
It’s hardly a novel idea. Users can conversely ask queries to the AI-powered ChatGPT and Bing Chat to receive responses to questions on a wide range of subjects. The creators of Perplexity, however, assert that their technology works more accurately overall.
In a news release, Srinivas stated, “We’ve constructed a first-of-its-kind conversational answer engine that’s anchored in presenting correct and relevant information through citations. Those who conduct online searches for information are confronted with many lists of links that are subject to manipulation by marketers and search engine optimisation. People are then required to sort through those websites and compile the material, most of which may not have been true to begin with. We hope to fix everything using Perplexity AI.
That is a challenging mission. But Perplexity is pushing forward and recently unveiled an iOS version that adds features like user sign-in for customization, persistent search history, and social sharing.
The money from the Series A, according to Srinivas, would be used for Perplexity’s growth and expansion objectives, including “optimising the application’s knowledge database.”
In order to maximise user knowledge and productivity, he continued, “this is a first step in our mission to establish the world’s most transparent information service.”
The generative AI firm Perplexity is only the most recent to catch the eye of major investors. Character.ai, a personalized chatbot platform, recently raised a $150 million Series A round with a $1 billion value.