AI search engine Perplexity.ai hits billion dollar valuation and releases new enterprise offering
Generative AI search startup Perplexity.ai has raised $62.7 million in a new round of funding, nearly doubling its January 2024 valuation to around $1 billion.
The new investment round was led by Daniel Gross, former head of Y Combinator’s AI division. New investors include Stanley Druckenmiller, Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator), Dylan Field (CEO of Figma), and Brad Gerstner (Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital). Many existing investors, including Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Tobi Lutke, and IVP, have also doubled their support.
Perplexity.ai plans to use the new funding to accelerate its global expansion. To that end, the company has partnered with telecommunications companies SoftBank Corp. of Japan and Deutsche Telekom to market Perplexity’s AI capabilities to consumers and businesses.
Perplexity launches enterprise offering
Perplexity.ai also launches “Enterprise Pro”, which it says is designed with security and control in mind. The service aims to make workplace search more accurate and efficient.
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With the paid version Perplexity Pro, the startup already offers voice input, unlimited file uploads, and unlimited search queries. Perplexity also enables access to various language models such as GPT-4 or Claude 3.
Enterprise Pro offers additional features such as enhanced data privacy, improved security, user management, SOC2 certification, data storage, and single sign-on (SSO).
Video: Perplexity
Early Enterprise Pro customers include Stripe, Zoom, Bridgewater, and Snowflake. Pricing starts at $40/month or $400/year per seat.
Answer engines threaten open Internet
Perplexity.ai’s search engine searches the web in real time and provides answers with source citations, as well as multimedia answers with charts, videos, and images for more context. The company aims to reinvent Internet search with generative AI.
Recommendation
Similar to offerings from Google or OpenAI, Perplexity disrupts the current Internet ecosystem by using information from websites without permission as the basis for a generated answer, but redirecting little traffic to the websites that originally published those answers. This threatens the open Internet as we know it today.
Neither Perplexity nor the major tech companies have adequately addressed this problem. OpenAI creates a new prisoner’s dilemma specifically for news publishers through selective licensing for its real-time offering.
In addition, there are open questions about responsibility for generated misinformation, incorrect source citations, and the fact that the tonality of the AI-generated answer is heavily influenced by the way the question is asked.
