AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to lift round $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, in keeping with the Wall Road Journal.
If a deal occurs with these phrases, it will greater than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer time. The WSJ experiences that the corporate at present receives about 15 million queries a day and brings in round $50 million in annualized income.
Perplexity makes use of AI to assist folks search the online in a chatbot-style interface. Some information publishers have accused the corporate of unauthorized internet scraping and plagiarism, and The New York Occasions has even despatched Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, however CEO Aravind Srinivas mentioned he desires to work with publishers and has “little interest in being anybody’s antagonist right here.”
These fundraising talks come after OpenAI introduced elevating a $6.6 billion spherical at a $157 billion valuation. Whereas merchandise like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the road between chatbot and search engine, the corporate is shifting extra immediately into search with SearchGPT.
Perplexity didn’t instantly reply to a TechCrunch request for remark.
