24 April 2024 — Perplexity AI, founded by IIT Madras graduate Aravind Srinivas, has achieved unicorn status with a valuation of $1.04 billion after raising $62.7 million in its fourth funding round.
The funding round attracted prominent investors in the AI sector, including NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Toby Lutke, Andrej Karpathy, Garry Tan, Naval Ravikant, Dylan Field, and Jakob Uszkoreit.
Perplexity AI distinguishes itself by offering a service similar to ChatGPT but with sourced citations and web traffic redirection to verify information. This approach positions Perplexity as a potential challenger to Google’s traditional search model.
Aravind Srinivas, with a background in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras and a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley focusing on AI topics, founded Perplexity in 2022. His internships at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google shaped the company’s direction.
Perplexity AI has an annualized revenue rate of approximately $20 million, primarily driven by paid subscriptions to its Perplexity Pro service, offering a search co-pilot and access to advanced language models like GPT-4 and Llama-3.
Conclusion:
With substantial funding and a unique approach to AI-driven search and information retrieval, Perplexity AI stands as a significant player in the global AI landscape. Its Indian roots add to the country’s growing influence in AI innovation and entrepreneurship.
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