Perplexity, which offers an AI-based “answer engine” with ~10M MAUs to compete with Google, raised $74M at a $520M valuation from IVP, Jeff Bezos, and others
if they continue on their current trajectory, I bet Google buys them for $2B within the year. Talia Goldberg / @taliagold : In October 2022, I wrote a piece about a trillion dollar opportunity in search. @perplexity_ai is that company. I only wish I realized a year sooner ;) Better late than never. Thrilled to officially be a part of the Perplexity journey. Luther Lowe / @lutherlowe : Congrats to @AravSrinivas & the team. I've watched the space closely and seen a lot of general search services come and go. Perplexity has incredible potential to finally disrupt the space, & it comes at a time when Google may finally be ordered to not put its thumb on the scale. Yann LeCun / @ylecun : Congrats @denisyarats and @AravSrinivas ! Aravind Srinivas / @aravsrinivas : Thanks, Yann. We are grateful to you and NYU to provide us lab space to do our first whiteboard and hacking sessions. We have fond memories of hanging out near the campus, and doing our Twitter Search demo in your office! Thanks also to you, @soumithchintala and Meta for LLama 2! Kyle Boddy / @drivelinekyle : Yeah, I finally got around to replacing right-click “Search with Google” with “Search with Perplexity” using a Chrome plugin. Google just hasn't done enough to combat blog spam while simultaneously overrunning their interface with nonsense. Congrats @perplexity_ai! Elad Gil / @eladgil : Big congrats! 🔥 @perplexity_ai : And Factorial Funds, Kindred Ventures, DVC, Austen Allred, and Erik Torenberg. Our dream of a better search experience is resonating - with 10M monthly users and counting. It was an honor to serve more than half a billion queries in 2023 alone. Denis Yarats / @denisyarats : Extremely excited to announce our Series B! We really appreciate the trust of our investors and users in giving us an opportunity to advance our mission of building the best answer engine! Max Weinbach / @maxwinebach : Lowkey not surprised If you've used Perplexity, you know it's BY FAR the best research tool/sorta search engine on the internet right now. Truly is an incredible tool Aravind Srinivas / @aravsrinivas : Thanks a lot, Nat, for the support, ever since the Seed Round, AI Grant help, and continued push for shipping and learning from users! And to @danielgross for being our first tester, and @Hersh_Desai for all help on AI Grant! Hersh Desai / @hersh_desai : Thanks @AravSrinivas for the kind words and making an amazing product that has taken over my home button on Chrome [image] Steve Jang / @stevejang : search engines are great for getting web links of varying relevance and staleness, while generating noisy traffic behavior. perplexity's AI engine is uniquely excellent for getting 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚. more on their... Soumith Chintala / @soumithchintala : Perplexity has become my most used AI app by the end of 2023. I use it for fact-seeking questions — including recent news / facts, summarizing opinions and recommendations on products and much more. ChatGPT + Browsing can do similar stuff, but its like 100x slower, and is often... Aravind Srinivas / @aravsrinivas : Some former Googlers who invested in Perplexity (Series A and Seed): Paul Buchheit: @paultoo: inventor of GMail Susan Wojcicki: former CEO of Youtube Ashish Vaswani: @ashVaswani: inventor of Transformers Nat Friedman / @natfriedman : Over the last six months Perplexity has become a product I use multiple times per day. This is so hard to achieve, and I think a testament to their relentless execution and good taste. Congrats to @AravSrinivas and the Perplexity team on the new round. Ishan / @radshaan : Not surprised. Perplexity remains the best AI-based search offering, even after multiple competing attempts from key players. Onwards and upwards! Sar Haribhakti / @sarthakgh : One of the most thoughtfully designed and practicality minded consumer products today Aravind Srinivas / @aravsrinivas : Excited to announce we've raised 73.6M$ at 520M$ valuation, led by IVP, along with our seed and Series A lead investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman. Honored to have NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, @tobi, Databricks, @naval, @rauchg, @balajis partner in this round, among others. [video] Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Jeff Bezos is an investor in Perplexity, an AI “answer engine” attempting to take on Google. I haven't tried it yet but have gotten multiple recommendations. Google search and LLM-based search today feels like Blackberry and the iPhone launching in 2007. https://www.wsj.com/... LinkedIn: Steven Tey : Huge congrats to Perplexity on their $73.6M Series B! — Perplexity has pretty much replaced Google for me given how accurate and - most importantly - ad-free their search results are. … Dmitry Shevelenko : Big day at Perplexity — announcing a $73M+ funding led by world-class investors. It's a privilege to provide people with instant & reliable answers to all their questions. …