AI Startup Perplexity Raises $500M, Boosting Valuation to $9B

Perplexity AI, an artificial intelligence startup, has successfully closed a $500 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $9 billion, according to Bloomberg. This financing round, led by institutional venture partners, was completed earlier in December 2024.

This latest valuation marks a significant leap from Perplexity's $1 billion valuation in April 2024. By June 2024, the company’s value had tripled to $3 billion following a strategic investment from SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund 2.

The $9 billion valuation now includes the funding raised in this round, solidifying Perplexity’s rapid growth. Founded in 2022, Perplexity AI offers real-time information through both paid and free versions of its search tool. The company has expanded its offerings with services such as searching internal files and providing finance-related features like stock prices and company earnings data.

As of March 2024, Perplexity had more than 15 million active users. The company also formed revenue-sharing partnerships with major publishers like Time and Fortune, following previous plagiarism accusations.

Backed by high-profile investors such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, Perplexity AI is also advancing its technology stack. Recently, the company acquired Carbon, a data connectivity startup, to enhance its capabilities. The acquisition enables users to seamlessly connect apps like Notion and Google Docs directly to Perplexity’s platform.

Perplexity shared its vision in a statement: “Carbon will make it easier for Perplexity’s answer engine to be informed by diverse sources of information, whether that data resides in internal databases, cloud storage, or document repositories. Rather than making users search through many different web pages, apps, and messages to find the answer they’re looking for, we see a future where Perplexity does the research for you, bringing the most critical insights across sources together as part of the answer. Carbon will simplify the process for our users to connect the data sources that matter to them.”

With this recent funding and strategic moves, Perplexity AI is poised for further growth in the competitive AI space.

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