Perplexity AI

Overview

Perplexity AI is an American AI company founded on 22 August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski^[1]. Srinivas is its chief executive^[1]. The company is headquartered in San Francisco^[1]. Its best-known product is an AI answer engine that uses large language models to answer questions with cited web sources^[1].

Origins and first product

The company launched its search engine on 7 December 2022^[1]. By February 2023 it reported two million unique visitors^[1].

Products and models

Perplexity offers a paid Pro tier that lets users choose among models from third parties. It also runs its own models: Sonar, based on Llama 3.3, and R1 1776, based on DeepSeek-R1. The Pro tier lets users choose models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as well^[1].

Over time the company added features beyond search. These included a publishers' revenue-sharing programme in July 2024, finance features in October 2024, a Shopping Hub in November 2024, Perplexity Assistant in January 2025, Deep Research on 14 February 2025 and the Comet browser on 9 July 2025^[1][2][3]. Deep Research runs many searches, reads many sources and writes a long report. The Comet browser is described in its own entry.

In February 2026 Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, a general-purpose agent that coordinates multiple models and subagents. In April 2026 it launched Personal Computer, which runs on a user's own device^[1].

Funding and valuation

Reported valuations rose quickly. Wikipedia lists $520 million in January 2024, when a $73.6 million round was raised, then over $1 billion in April 2024, after $165 million had been raised in total^[1]. Later figures were $9 billion in December 2024, $14 billion in June 2025 after a $500 million round, and $20 billion in September 2025. In early 2026 a Series E-6 round put the company at $21.21 billion^[1]. Investors reported include Jeff Bezos, Tobias Lütke, Nat Friedman, Nvidia, Databricks and 1789 Capital^[1].

Deals and bids

The company made several large proposals. On 18 January 2025 it submitted a bid to merge with TikTok US. On 12 August 2025 it offered $34.5 billion to buy Google's Chrome browser^[1]. In January 2026 it signed a three-year, $750 million agreement with Microsoft for Azure access, and AWS remained its main cloud provider^[1].

In February 2026 Perplexity dropped plans for advertising and moved to a subscription-first model^[1].

Disputes

The company has faced several copyright and content disputes. Dow Jones and the New York Post sued in 2024. Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei brought suits in August 2025. Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster did so in September 2025, Reddit in October 2025 and CNN in May 2026^[1].

In June 2024 Forbes accused Perplexity of copying its reporting, and Wired reported that the company ignored robots.txt, a file that tells crawlers which pages not to visit. In August 2025 Cloudflare published research accusing the company of stealth crawling^[1].

Impact and limits

Perplexity is one of several companies that show how AI tools now sit between readers and web content. Its citation design is a central idea for readers to understand, because it tries to show where each answer came from. The disputes above show that the source question remains open. Readers should check the current status of the lawsuits and company statements before drawing conclusions.