Perplexity, a San Francisco-based startup which operates a fully functional conversational answer engine, has raised $73.6 million in a Series B funding round.
IVP led the round, with participation from existing investors including NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks. New investors include 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.
This funding round brings Perplexity’s total capital raised to date to $100 million, following its $25.6 million Series A round held in March last year. The startup aims to use this new capital towards boosting customer adoption and international expansion.
Since its founding in 2022 and its public launch last year, Perplexity claims to have grown to 10 million monthly active users and served 500 million queries on its engine in 2023.
Perplexity says its search tools enable users to get “instant, reliable” answers to questions, replete with sources and citations, without the need to click on different links, compare answers or look for further 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,” Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, writes on the company blog.
“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,” he adds.
Since its Series A, Perplexity has launched its own AI research assistant, Copilot, which targets academics, students and knowledge workers, and possesses the ability to ask follow-up questions to provide in-depth answers.