California-based startup Perplexity has successfully raised $73.6 million in a series-B funding round, led by prominent investors such as Nvidia and Jeff Bezos. This funding round brings the total valuation of the company to $520 million. Perplexity, known as “the world’s first fully functional conversational answer engine,” employs its own unique search, indexing, and crawling techniques to extract information from the web, generating concise responses to user queries.
Perplexity utilizes various large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, Google’s Gemini, and its own LLM Perplexity, in its search tool. Subscribers can access these models through Perplexity Pro, available for a monthly fee of $20. The startup has also introduced additional features to enhance its AI search, such as Copilot, which suggests follow-up questions to refine search inquiries.
Seeking to disrupt the dominance of Google in the internet search industry, Perplexity aims to offer users an alternative method to retrieve information from the web. While Google was slow to introduce its AI chatbot, Perplexity and other competitors like OpenAI have taken advantage of this opening.
Perplexity holds immense promise and has amassed the largest amount of funding in recent years for a web search business. Subscriptions and AI software sales have generated between $5 million to $10 million in revenue for the company. CEO Aravind Srinivas has indicated that Perplexity may also expand into the advertising business in the future.
Although Perplexity’s product is not entirely foolproof and may occasionally produce false information, the startup emphasizes the importance of accuracy and transparency in AI-powered search. Users are encouraged to verify facts and inspect sources, particularly if they receive contradictory responses. Perplexity aims to revolutionize information consumption and sharing, envisioning a society propelled into a new era of accelerated learning and research.
The recent funding round was led by venture capital firm IVP and attracted notable investors such as Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others, underscoring the confidence in Perplexity’s potential to disrupt the search industry.
The source of the article is from the blog revistatenerife.com