AI-powered search engine startup Perplexity AI recently raised a whopping $26M in a Series A funding round, with New Enterprise Associates leading the round along with participation from Databricks Ventures and notable angel investors such as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun. Perplexity also launched a mobile app for iOS users, taking their search engine services to the next level.
Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine which allows users to ask questions in natural language and get relevant responses from sources around the web. Unlike other search engines, it uses advanced AI algorithms to respond to questions faster, more accurately, and more contextually. It was created by four experienced engineers – Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski – with backgrounds in backend systems, AI, and machine learning.
The elevated funding will help the startup to realize their mission of building the most transparent information service and optimizing the average consumer’s knowledge and productivity. The AI-powered technology has also attracted notable investors competing in the ever-evolving and lucrative generative AI space – for instance, Character.ai, a personalized chatbot platform, closed a $150 million Series A round at a valuation of $1 billion just last month.
Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, says that the funds from the round will be put into the optimization of the app’s knowledge database. He believes that “when people search online for answers to their questions, they’re presented with endless lists of links that can be manipulated by advertisers and search engine optimization”. By providing accurate and relevant responses to questions, he hopes to provide a better alternative “to sift through those websites and distill the information, much of which may not be accurate in the first place.”
Aravind Srinivas is a distinguished AI researcher, having interned at both DeepMind and Google and then joining OpenAI as an AI researcher. Denis Yarats was previously a staff machine learning engineer at Quora, and then an AI research scientist at Meta. Johnny Ho worked as engineer at Quora and a trader on Wall Street. Andy Konwinski co-founded Databricks. Combining their impressive backgrounds, these founders have set themselves up for long-term success with Perplexity AI.
