Insider Brief
- Perplexity, an AI-powered conversational answer engine, has achieved significant growth, reaching 10 million monthly active users and handling over half a billion queries in 2023, with more than a million downloads of its mobile apps.
- The company has raised $73.6 million in Series B funding, totaling $100 million to date, from notable investors including IVP, NEA, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and others, to support its expansion and consumer adoption.
- Perplexity’s search tool provides instant, accurate answers with sources and citations, featuring innovative products like Copilot, an AI research assistant.
PRESS RELEASE — San Francisco, California/January 4, 2024 — AI is fundamentally changing how people gain information and satisfy their quest for knowledge.
Today, we’re announcing milestones reinforcing Perplexity’s increasingly dominant role in this new era of AI-native search. Since publicly launching the world’s first fully functional conversational answer engine a year ago, we’ve grown to 10 million monthly active users and have served over half a billion queries in 2023. More than a million people have installed our mobile apps, both on iOS and Android. But our ambition is to serve the entire planet’s unbounded curiosity, and we’re just getting started.
To support our rapid consumer adoption and expansion plans, we’ve raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from trusted VC firms and prominent tech visionaries. IVP led the round with continued support from our Seed and Series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds, and Kindred Ventures, among others. Building upon our Series A earlier this year, we’ve now raised $100 million to date.
“Perplexity is intensely building a product capable of bringing the power of AI to billions. The team possesses the unique ability to uphold a grand, long-term vision while shipping product relentlessly, requirements to tackle a problem as important and fundamental as search.” — Cack Wilhelm, General Partner, IVP, who led the round, and joins Perplexity’s Board of Directors.
“While there has been a lot of excitement around business-to-business and developer-related AI capabilities, AI will also transform how we access information. Perplexity is at the forefront of this shift as one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs. They will become the go-to place for trusted information, which is why I am so excited that Perplexity is NVIDIA’s first consumer investment from our corporate arm.” — Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at NVIDIA.
With Perplexity’s search tools, users get instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included. There is no need to click on different links, compare answers, or endlessly dig for information. In an era where misinformation and AI hallucinations are causing increasing concern, we’re built on the idea that accuracy and transparency are prerequisites to making AI-powered search ubiquitous. The times of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links, and multiple web pages will be replaced by a much more efficient way to consume and share information, propelling our society into a new era of accelerated learning and research.
Since our previous funding round, we’ve launched Copilot, a first-of-its-kind AI research assistant that has changed how we uncover information and learn more about new topics. Copilot tailors search queries with custom follow-up questions, introducing the concept of generative user interfaces. It removes the burden of prompt engineering and does not require users to ask perfectly phrased questions to get the answers they seek. This enables users to gain more relevant and comprehensive answers than other AI chatbots, traditional search engines, or research tools. Copilot has seen strong traction, especially among academics, students, and knowledge workers who rely on frequent research for their day-to-day work and needs.
It’s not just about our technology but also how people use it. We stand at the inflection point of a massive behavioral shift in how people access information online. I am excited about the potential for Perplexity to enhance our curiosity and intelligence by providing streamlined access to reliable information. We are privileged to have the support of leading investors, technologists, and, most importantly, the millions of users who have trusted us with their time and support as we fulfill this grand mission of making the planet smarter by continuing to build the fastest and most accurate platform for answering any question.
Aravind Srinivas
Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity
Direct media inquiries to perplexity@sixeastern.com
