A recent Wall Street report revealed that the startup Perplexity AI is raising $500 million. According to this report, this funding would place Perplexity’s valuation at approximately $14 billion, up from $9 billion in its most recent round in December, 2024.
Perplexity was the first AI search engine that combined an index of the web with language models that could summarize and expound on multiple webpages. It has since been followed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are valued at $300 billion and $62 billion, respectively.
AI products like Perplexity seem to challenge Google’s dominance when it comes to search. Perplexity’s latest funding indicates that investors now see a rising potential when it comes to AI-driven search. During the penalty phase of U.S. v. Google, the landmark antitrust suit that revolves around Google’s U.S. search monopoly, Google itself has made the argument that new search options from AI have already changed the competitive dynamic in search.
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Perplexity had also indicated an interest in running Chrome if the U.S. government forces it to be spun out of Google. In addition, the startup has also revealed plans to launch its own browser, Comet. “The reason we’re doing the browser is that it might be the best way to build agents,” CEO Aravind Srinivas said. “A browser is essentially a containerized operating system. It can let you access other third-party services through hidden tabs if you’re already logged into them, scrape the page on the client side, and perform reasoning and take actions on your behalf.”
Perplexity AI is also among the artificial intelligence services likely to be incorporated in Apple’s redesigned Safari browser, along with ChatGPT and Claude. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services mentioned that the rise of AI has changed how people search the web, thus challenging Google’s dominance. Apple had also called its Google Search deal non-essential because of the rise in AI, despite fighting to continue the deal.