Polymarket, a prediction marketplace that allows users to bet on real-world events, has partnered with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to surface news summaries of events.
When users click on an event in Polymarket, they are now shown a summary of news related to the event based on Perplexity's search results, with a search box to ask further questions.
Polymarket is also using Perplexity's Pages feature (which allows users to create shareable pages from search results) to create columns that will appear on Perplexity's Discover page, and Perplexity said it will explore partnerships with more third parties to feature content in the Discover section.
Perplexity also uses data such as election trends from Polymarket to display visuals in its answers. These visuals are generated using Tako, another AI platform.
“Polymarket has become the go-to place for anyone wanting to access reliable information on an increasingly noisy web. We see Perplexity as a company committed to a similar mission, so it made perfect sense for us to invest in deepening our partnership,” Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, told TechCrunch in an email.
The partnership follows a similar one with Polymarket, which allows Substack writers to embed predictive data from the prediction marketplace into their posts. Polymarket also recently launched its own Substack newsletter, called Oracle.
For Perplexity, Polymarket will be an API customer, and the AI search engine will generate revenue from API calls made by users looking up and asking questions about events in the prediction marketplace.
Perplexity's chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, told TechCrunch that the company primarily targets consumers and knowledge workers in enterprise environments, but that it is seeing a growing number of developers using the Perplexity API.
“We are a consumer-centric company, so the API business is not a priority for us. However, API usage is still growing, and more than 25,000 developers use our API. We offer a unique service that pulls answers from various internet sources,” Shevelenko said.
“The way we think about APIs today is as a means to grow our brand, not an end in itself.”
Beyond enterprises, he noted, publishers are using Perplexity's API to allow users to search for articles on their platforms. Other use cases include banks looking to run know-your-customer (KYC) processes, marketing tools, and financial services looking to get the latest information.
News organizations have accused Perplexity of plagiarizing their research and ignoring robots.txt instructions on their websites to scrape the web. The company has since pledged to prominently display citations and partner with media outlets through an advertising revenue-sharing program.
Shevelenko declined to say how many people click on the sources that appear next to Perplexity's search results, but said the number is “in the double digits.”
Perplexity, backed by NEA, IVP, Sequoia and Jeff Bezos, is the last $63 million It was announced in March at a $1 billion valuation, and a month later TechCrunch reported that the startup was looking to raise $250 million at a valuation of between $2.5 billion and $3 billion.