Bezos, Nvidia Backed ChatGPT Rival Doubles Valuation to $1B

AI-powered search platform Perplexity has raised $62.7 million in venture funding to challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Perplexity is a chatbot that lets users search the web using AI. The conversational platform responds to user prompts with citations and sources from where it got the information to provide more transparent responses.

Daniel Gross, former head of AI at Y Combinator, led the round, joined by Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, Figma CEO Dylan Field and Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the ex-Google researchers who developed the original Transformer model.

Existing investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke also joined the round.

This latest round brings Perplexity’s total capital raised to $165 million and doubles its total valuation to more than $1 billion.

“We will use the additional funding to grow our usage across consumers and knowledge workers in enterprises,” Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“We look forward to continuing to accelerate and grow and to providing accurate knowledge and information to every person on the planet.”

In addition to its funding news, Perplexity announced its first enterprise-focused offering.

Perplexity Enterprise Pro is a business-tailored version of its chatbot, with the startup touting it as a tool to optimize employee workflows.

Related:AI Startup Roundup: Perplexity Gets Jeff Bezos’ Backing

“Perplexity’s answer engine browses the internet in real-time and provides complete, verifiable answers with citations, along with multimedia answers that include charts, videos and images to provide more context,” according to a company announcement.

“Instead of searching for an answer and having to browse through spammy websites full of affiliated links, Perplexity streamlines your employee’s workflow to help them save time.”

Example Perplexity conversation | Credit: AI Business via Perplexity

Enterprise customers get access to unlimited file uploads and unlimited search assistance queries.

It also comes with voice-to-text features, enabling employees to prompt the chatbot using their voice.

Enterprise Pro users can easily add and remove team members to limit access to the chatbot. All queries are deleted automatically from the system after seven days.

It has also been granted a SOC2 Certification, an accreditation from outside auditors that signals a product handles user data securely

Perplexity pledged that it wouldn’t train its large language models on data from enterprise users.

Perplexity Enterprise Pro costs $40 a month or $400 a year per user.

It has already had a limited rollout. Zoom, synthetic voice developer ElevenLabs and HP are among the early users.

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Zoom’s product teams used the new Perplexity offering to help with targeted search while sales staff at HP used the platform to research prospective customers.

Data platform developer Databricks was also among the early users. CEO Ali Ghodsi said it has allowed the company to “substantially accelerate R&D, making it easier for our engineering, marketing and sales teams to execute faster.”

“We estimate it helps our team save 5,000 working hours monthly,” Ghodsi said.

Perplexity also struck partnerships to expand its reach, including new deals with SoftBank and German telco Deutsche Telekom.