According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), AI search engine Perplexity is currently valued at $8 billion and is hoping to raise about $500 million in funding.
If a deal goes through on these terms, Perplexity’s valuation would more than double the $3 billion it was valued at when it raised money from SoftBank last summer. According to WSJ, the company currently receives about 15 million queries per day and has annual revenue of about $50 million.
Perplexity uses AI to help people browse the web in a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the company of unauthorized web scraping and plagiarism, and The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and is “not interested in becoming someone else’s.” He said. Here’s the antagonist.”
These funding talks come after OpenAI announced it had raised $6.6 billion in funding at a valuation of $157 billion. While products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the lines between chatbots and search engines, the company is taking a more direct approach to search with SearchGPT.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
