Perplexity, a startup AI firm that is aiming to outdo Google in web search capabilities, has secured investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other venture capitalists.
Perplexity is made up of little over 30 employees and was founded less than two years ago. Its flagship product is referred to as an “answer engine” and is currently being used by around 10 million people per month, despite the fact that they are operating out of a shared workspace.
Their numbers encouraged Bezos and his fellow tech executives-turned-investors at Institutional Venture Partners to expend $74 million into the firm.
That amount is higher than anything the startup tech sector has seen in recent years. It brought Perplexity’s worth up to $520 million according to CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Perplexity AI valued at $520 mln in funding from Bezos, Nvidia https://t.co/WEjH63baO3 pic.twitter.com/w9QBoAVl6D
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 4, 2024
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Google takes up about 90% of the web search engine market share. Microsoft has tried and failed to supplant the giant with Bing for around a decade. But Perplexity is confident it has the tools to finally do it.
Perplexity uses the latest AI technology to scan the web and provide users with answers to their questions directly, rather than aggregating links. “If you can directly answer somebody’s question, nobody needs those 10 blue links,” the CEO said. Perplexity is already offering a paid premium model for interested users.
Other recent Perplexity investors include former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Senior Vice President of AI at Google Jeff Dean.
In September, it was announced that Amazon invested $4 billion into AI company Anthropic and negotiated a deal with them to use Amazon chips to build their products. Leading cloud companies AWS, Microsoft, and Google have each decided to center generative AI in their sales campaigns, spurred to do so by widespread attraction to ChatGPT and other labor saving or creative AI tools.
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter).
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