According to the Wall Street Journal, AI search engine Perplexity is in talks to raise about $500 million at a valuation of $8 billion.
If the deal closes on these terms, Perplexity would be valued at more than double the $3 billion it was valued at when it raised money from SoftBank in the summer. The company currently receives about 15 million queries per day and generates about $50 million in annual revenue, WSJ reports.
Perplexity uses AI to help people search the web with a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the company of unauthorized web scraping and plagiarism, and the New York Times has also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said the publisher “I'm not interested in becoming someone else's property,” he said. The enemy here. ”
These funding talks come after OpenAI announced $6.6 billion in funding at a $157 billion valuation. While products like OpenAI's ChatGPT blur the lines between chatbots and search engines, the company is moving more directly into search with SearchGPT.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.