SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — AI startup Perplexity, led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, successfully secured a substantial $73.6 million in funding, catapulting the company’s valuation to $520 million. The funding round was spearheaded by IVP, with support from seed and Series A lead investors, including NEA, Elad Gil, and Nat Friedman. Other participants include NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lütke, Databricks, Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch, and Balaji Srinivasan.
The funds raised will supercharge hiring, according to Srinivas. It has 38 people at present and they plan to double that total by the end of the year.
Perplexity’s search product offers instant answers to questions with sources and citations. It is powered by a variety of large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI and Meta’s Llama.
But they are up against Google, the behemoth search engine pioneer that has more than 90% market share currently.
