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Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that delivers direct, cited answers to natural-language questions. It combines real-time web search with large language models to provide conversational search, replacing traditional link-based results. Products include Perplexity Pro (subscription), Perplexity Enterprise Pro (business tier), and an API for developers.
Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that delivers direct, cited answers to natural-language questions. It combines real-time web search with large language models to provide conversational search, replacing traditional link-based results. Products include Perplexity Pro (subscription), Perplexity Enterprise Pro (business tier), and an API for developers.
Founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas (CEO, ex-OpenAI/Google), Denis Yarats (CTO, ex-Meta FAIR), Andy Konwinski (ex-Databricks co-founder), and Johnny Ho (ex-Quora). The team set out to build a better search experience by combining retrieval with large language models, launching a public product in December 2022 and growing rapidly on the thesis that AI answer engines would replace traditional keyword search.
Perplexity's annual recurring revenue grew from $80M in late 2024 to an estimated $200M by February 2026, driven by Pro subscriptions and enterprise customers.
Perplexity grew from approximately 310 employees in early 2025 to over 1,200 by early 2026, driven by aggressive hiring in engineering, research, and enterprise sales following its Series D and E rounds.
Perplexity reported over 7,000 enterprise customers and approximately 45 million users by early 2026, with enterprise accounts executing nearly 20 million queries daily.
A follow-on funding round of $200 million reportedly values Perplexity at $20 billion as of September 2025, continuing its rapid valuation growth.
Accel led a $500 million Series E round valuing Perplexity at $14 billion in May 2025, its largest round to date at the time.
SoftBank became the first authorized reseller of Perplexity Enterprise Pro in Japan, deploying it internally for six months before rolling it out to Japanese corporate customers.
Perplexity formed a distribution partnership with Bharti Airtel, granting its 360+ million Indian subscribers a free year of Perplexity Pro as part of the company's global expansion push.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $500M round valuing Perplexity at $9 billion. The round included IVP, B Capital, and T. Rowe Price, signaling major institutional confidence.
Perplexity launched its Enterprise Pro tier targeting business users, simultaneously announcing SoftBank as an authorized reseller in Japan and Deutsche Telekom as a European distribution partner.
IVP led a $73.6 million Series B at a $520M valuation. Notable new investors included Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions and NVIDIA, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners.
$1.4B raised total