The American start-up Perplexity AI, known for its artificial intelligence research service, has seen its monthly turnover multiply sevenfold since the start of the year, as has its usage. In addition, Perplexity has concluded a new financing round amounting to 250 million dollars (228 million euros), reports the “Financial Times”. The company’s valuation thus tripled to reach three billion dollars.
The AI-powered search engine answered around 250 million queries last month. For comparison, this figure stood at 500 million for the whole of 2023, as explained Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer of Perplexity, to the newspaper.
One of the fastest growing AI applications
Perplexity is therefore considered one of the fastest growing generative AI applications since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022. The San Francisco-based company was founded by Aravind Srinivas, a former Google intern, just three months before ChatGPT launched. The startup uses AI software to answer questions by getting “real-time” information from across the internet, including news sites.
https://srqbacklot.com/innovation/une-avancee-revolutionnaire-dans-le-domaine-de-lenergie-solaire-pourrait-reduit-le-nesoin-de-fermes-solaires/594882/
At the start of the year, Perplexity still had an extrapolated annual revenue of $5 million. According to a company insider, the company today generates more than 35 million dollars, as the “FT” learned.
Many celebrities involved
Perplexity is changing its business model and will in the future rely on advertising rather than subscriptions, as has been the case until now. This puts the company in closer competition with Google, which dominates the $300 billion search ads market.
Investors such as Softbank’s Vision Fund 2 participated in the latest financing round, with which Perplexity wants to establish itself against larger competitors. Existing investors include artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (60), as well as several personalities from the artificial intelligence sector such as the co-founder of OpenAI Andrej Karpathy (37) and Meta’s chief scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun.
According to Shevelenko, a “double-digit” percentage of the revenue from each sponsored article is shared with the named news publishers. The company has concluded contracts with Time, DER SPIEGEL and Fortune, among others.
Toyota abandonne l’hydrogène pour l’électrique : Ce moteur est-il le plus grand échec de tous les temps ?
Before Perplexity announced its recent partnerships with publishers, the company was accused of plagiarism by Forbes and Wired. The start-up was accused of having reproduced stories without clearly naming them and of having extracted websites that it had expressly blocked. Shevelenko acknowledged the accusations and explained that the company took note of the criticism and made changes to its user interface to highlight the quotes more clearly. Additionally, she would ensure that the answers do not summarize the websites.