Generative artificial intelligence (AI) firm Perplexity is said to be in the process of closing a $500 million funding round, which would value the start-up north of $14 billion, and possibly cement its place as one of the most promising AI firms that has the potential to disrupt Internet search.
Perplexity aims to break Google’s decades-long dominance on Internet search, and is currently in the process of launching its own browser—called Comet—to rival Google’s Chrome. It has attracted intense interest from investors, having previously raised funding from the likes of Nvidia, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, and tech pioneers including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, Google AI executive Jeff Dean and Meta’s Yann LeCun.
The firm’s meteoric rise comes as Google fights its own battles – most prominently, an anticompetitive challenge against the company, where regulators in the United States have been pushing for breaking up the search giant.
A new browser
It is expected that the fresh funding would go towards fueling the firm’s browser ambitions. “Perplexity will be launching Comet, a new agentic browser, very soon! This is a pretty serious engineering undertaking. Please join us to help build the future of internet browsing, with AIs doing deep research and tasks for us,” the firm’s founder Aravind Srinivas had said in a LinkedIn post earlier this year.
The browser is likely to include agentic AI capabilities and the ability to automate certain tasks. According to a screenshot shared by the firm’s founder Aravind Srinivas on social media platform X, the browser could send automated responses to a post on X through Comet.
Perplexity’s current AI offering, a platform which wraps around other large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek with its own fine-tuning of responses, is considered by many to be a credible way to search the Internet. The service offers quick summaries of responses to any given question and also shows the resources on which it was basing its summary on.
Unlike the current search engine experience, where a question is responded by multitudes of links to other websites which may actually contain the answer to the question, AI-based browsers are expected to change the paradigm of online search, by not only offering personalised, concise responses to a query, but also prompting a user to look for more related and relevant prompts that could further solve their query.
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Amid Google’s woes
Last month, a US judge ruled that Google has illegal monopolies in ad technology, setting up a possibility that regulators could push for breaking up the company. Last year, a US judge ruled that Google violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly and become the world’s default search engine.
These judgments are a setback to the online search giant, which has seemingly been on the backfoot of perception wars in the AI race, which have come to be dictated by the likes of OpenAI, and more recently, China’s DeepSeek.
For years, Google has wielded great power over the Internet, from being the undisputed leader of online search to its acquisition of Android (and later the bundling of its services), which powers a majority of smartphones around the world today.
The rise of the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity is the first time the Mountain View, California, based company has faced increasing competition in its own fortress.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
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