Recently, the unified data analytics platform Databricks secured a historic $10 billion in funding at a valuation of $62 billion. This investment followed OpenAI’s $6.6 billion investment at a valuation of $157 billion. These rounds show the ever-increasing interest in AI technologies. Likewise, Perplexity AI, which was reported that its going to close $500 million in funding earlier last month is now in reports that it has already closed the round.
Steady rise in valuation
As per reports, the AI-driven search engine Perplexity has raised $500 million in its fourth funding round, tripling its valuation to $9 billion. According to Bloomberg, Silicon Valley-based VC IVP (which backed Cradle and Volt) led the latest investment round. Perplexity was valued at $1 billion in April, which rose to $3 billion in June after the Nvidia-backed company received an investment from SoftBank Group Vision Fund 2. At the beginning of this year, the company was valued at $520 million.
Acquires data connectivity startup Carbon
In addition to the investment round, Perplexity announced the acquisition of a small Seattle-based startup called Carbon. The latter specialises in connecting AI systems to external data sources and it will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in enterprise applications, including Notion, Google Docs, Slack, etc. in early 2025.
Carbon, which works in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to allow large language models to access details from external databases before generating an answer.
AI-powered search engine
Perplexity AI was founded by former Google researchers Arvind Srinivas, Dennis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski with engineering backgrounds in AI, distributed systems, search engines, and databases. Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, has previous experience at OpenAI.
Perplexity AI integrates ChatGPT and the Google search engine. The platform’s AI responds with summaries containing source citations, such as websites and articles. Users can ask follow-up questions to delve deeper into a particular topic with Perplexity AI’s search engine. Unlike traditional search engines, it provides a chatbot-like interface that allows users to ask questions in natural language.
What does Pro version offer?
The company has a freemium version that lets users can find information using their default model. Also, there is a paid version dubbed Perplexity Enterprise Pro priced at $40/month or $400/year. The company also offers a lower-cost Perplexity Pro version at $20 per month, which unlocks access to Perplexity Copilot.
The Pro version of its AI-powered search engine includes added features that provide stronger security and data protection such as team member management and deleting queries after a week. This opens up access to voice-to-text, unlimited file uploads, unlimited search queries, personal preferences, and image generation capabilities.
The company uses the power of multiple large language models to deliver its results. It includes models developed in-house and external models such as Google’s Gemini, Mistral 7B, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s GPT-4.
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