AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Getty/NurPhoto
Perplexity AI closed a $500 million funding round earlier this month, pushing its valuation to $9 billion, a source familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
That means the AI search engine startup has managed to triple its valuation within six months after an investment from SoftBank put the company at a $3 billion valuation in June.
The latest funding round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, the source told Bloomberg. CNBC also reported in November that Perplexity was in the final stages of securing the investment from IVP.
A spokesperson for Perplexity declined to comment. A spokesperson for Institutional Venture Partners did not return a request for comment.
Perplexity is among a handful of buzzy AI startups that have seen their valuation balloon this year amid a feeding frenzy from VCs and investors looking for companies focused on artificial intelligence.
Anthropic, which built the Claude AI model, announced an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon in November.
That same month, Elon Musk told investors that his AI venture, xAI, raised $5 billion, valuing the startup at $50 billion.
In October, OpenAI announced that it had raised $6.6 billion at a historic $157 billion valuation.
Those large investments also come despite some of the controversies AI startups face around data and copyrighted work.
In October, News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing the startup of copyright infringement.
OpenAI is facing a similar legal battle that was filed by The New York Times last year. The publication said OpenAI used "millions" of articles to train the startup's ChatGPT model.
Both startups have denied the allegations.
Perplexity acquired a small Seattle-based startup called Carbon which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources, the companies announced on Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan says this will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and other enterprise applications sometime in early 2025. Carbon specializes in […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Stumped on what to get my mom for Christmas this year, I turned, desperately, to Perplexity AI's chatbot. In response to my initial broad question: "What should I get my mom for Christmas?," the robo-elf gave me links to several gift guides published on sites including Target and Country Living. Then the chatbot suggested generic favorites like a Stanley mug and a foot massager. But as I scrolled, it also dropped links directly to more esoteric gifts, including a mug with Donald Trump on it. "You are a really, really great mom," the mug read. "Other moms? Losers, total disasters." I hadn't given Perplexity any indication of political ideology among my family, but the bot seemed to think sipping from Trump's visage every morning was a gift any mother would love. Then it suggested I make a jar and stuff it with memories I've written down. A cute idea, but I did let Perplexity know that I'm in my 30s — I don't think the made-at-home gift for mom is going to cut it.
'Tis the season to scramble and buy tons of stuff people don't need or really even want. At least that's how it can feel when trying to come up with gifts for family members who have everything already. Money has been forked over for restaurant gift cards that collect dust or slippers and scarves that pile up; trendy gadgets are often relegated to junk drawers by March. As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into online shopping, this whole process should get easier — if AI can come to understand the art behind giving a good gift. Shopping has become one of Perplexity's top search categories in the US, particularly around the holidays, Sara Platnick, a spokesperson for Perplexity, tells me. While Platnick didn't comment directly on individual gift suggestions Perplexity's chatbots makes, she tells me that product listings provided in responses are determined by "ratings and its relevance to a user's request."
There are chatbots to consult for advice this holiday season, like Perplexity and ChatGPT, but AI is increasingly seeping into the entire shopping experience. From customer-service chatbots handling online shopping woes to ads serving recommendations that follow you across the web, AI's presence has ramped up alongside the explosion of interest in generative AI. Earlier this year, Walmart unveiled generative-AI-powered search updates that allow people to search for things like "football watch party" instead of looking for items like chips and salsa individually; Google can put clothes on virtual models in a range of sizes to give buyers a better idea of how they'll look. In a world with more options than ever, there's more help from AI, acting as robo-elves in a way — omnipresent and sometimes invisible as you shop across the web.
For the indecisive shopper, AI may be a silver bullet to choosing from hundreds of sweaters to buy, plucking the best one from obscurity and putting an end to endless scrolling — or it might help to serve up so many targeted ads that it leads people to overconsume.
AI can help people discover new items they may never have known to buy online, but it can't replace that intuition we have when we find the perfect thing for a loved one.
Either way, AI has been completely changing the e-commerce game. "It allows a company to be who the customer wants it to be," says Hala Nelson, a professor of mathematics at James Madison University. "You cannot hire thousands of human assistants to assist each customer, but you can deploy thousands of AI assistants." Specialization comes from using third-party data to track activity and preferences across the web. In a way, that's the personalized level of service high-end stores have always provided to elite shoppers. Now, instead of a consultation, the expertise is built on surveillance.
Companies also use AI to forecast shopping trends and manage inventory, which can help them prepare and keep items in stock for those last-minute shoppers. Merchants are constantly looking for AI to get them more — to bring more eyes to their websites, to get people to add more items to their carts, and ultimately to actually check out and empty their carts. In October and early November, digital retailers using AI tech and agents increased the average value of an order by 7% when compared to sites that did not employ the technology, according to Salesforce data. The company predicted AI and shopping agents to influence 19% of orders during the week of cyber deals around Thanksgiving. And AI can help "level the playing field for small businesses," says Adam Nathan, the founder and CEO of Blaze, an AI marketing tool for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
"They don't want to necessarily be Amazon, Apple, or Nike, they just want to be the No. 1 provider of their service or product in their local community," Nathan says. "They're not worried about AI taking their job — they're worried about a competitor using AI. They see it as basically a way to get ahead."
AI early adopters in the e-commerce space benefited last holiday season, but the tech has become even more common this year, says Guillaume Luccisano, the founder and CEO of Yuma AI, a company that automates customer service for sellers that use Shopify. Some merchants that used Yuma AI during the Black Friday shopping craze automated more than 60% of their customer-support tickets, he says. While some people lament having to deal with a bot instead of a person, Luccisano says the tech is getting better, and people are mostly concerned about whether their problem is getting solved, not whether the email came from a real person or generative AI.
After my ordeal with Perplexity, I turned to see how ChatGPT would fare in helping me find gifts for the rest of my family. For my 11-year-old cousin, it suggested a Fitbit or smartwatch for kids to help her "stay active." A watch that tracks activity isn't something I feel comfortable giving a preteen, so I provided some more details. I told ChatGPT she loved the "Twilight" series, so it suggested a T-shirt with the Cullen family crest and a "Twilight"-themed journal to write fan fiction. It told me I could likely find these items on Etsy but it didn't give me direct links. (As her cool millennial cousin who has lived to tell of my own "Twilight" phase in 2007, I did end up buying a makeup bag from Etsy with a movie scene printed on it.) I also asked ChatGPT for suggestions for my 85-year-old grandpa, and it came up with information about electronic picture frames — but the bulk of our family photos are stuffed in albums and shoeboxes in his closet and not easily digitized.
I could navigate this list because these are deep contextual things that I know about my family members, something AI doesn't know yet. Many of the best gifts I've ever received are from friends and family members who stumbled upon something they knew I would love — a vinyl record tucked in a bin or a print from an independent artist on display at a craft show. AI can play a role in helping people discover new items they may never have known to buy online, but it can't replace that intuition we have when we find the perfect thing for a loved one. "We're still really wrestling with: How accurate is it? How much of a black box is it?" says Koen Pauwels, a professor of marketing at Northeastern University. "Humans are way better still in getting cues from their environment and knowing the context." If you want to give a gift that's really a hit, it looks like you'll still have to give the AI elves a helping hand.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
The US government is calling on a Perplexity executive to help make its case that Google is a monopolist.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Monday, Reddit announced it would test an AI-powered search feature called "Reddit Answers" that uses an AI model to create summaries from existing Reddit posts to respond to user questions, reports Reuters.
The feature generates responses by searching through Reddit's vast collection of community discussions and comments. When users ask questions, Reddit Answers provides summaries of relevant conversations and includes links to related communities and posts.
The move potentially puts Reddit in competition with traditional search engines like Google and newer AI search tools like those from OpenAI and Perplexity. But while other companies pull information from across the Internet, Reddit Answers focuses only on content within Reddit's platform.
Perplexity AI
Where do you start when hiring for your startup? The CEO of Perplexity AI has some tips.
Aravind Srinivas, who cofounded the AI startup in 2022, discussed his approach to leading Perplexity in a recent interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In the earliest days of the startup, Srinivas said he looked to bring on cofounders and "people with complementary skills."
"You don't want to be as good as them in what they excel at — I think they should be a lot better. Also, you don't want to step on their toes when they do that."
Over time, you build the team out further with a similar approach, targeting people who can "bring in new skills," he added.
The AI CEO also talked about his approach to running a company as it grew.
"I would say there's an extreme bias for action that I try to bring in and try to encourage everybody else in the company to adopt," he said. "And I think that's what's helping us continue to be fast, even when you've gotten to about 100 people."
Srinivas recalled advice he once received from a founder who said, "Once you get to 100 people, you're guaranteed to move slow."
While it's "so far, so good" at Perplexity, Srinivas said that at some point "you're going to hit the problems of scale and how to move fast, so I'm determined to solve that problem."
Srinivas also spoke of the importance of taking chances on people who have "some chips on their shoulders."
"Giving people who haven't necessarily become experts at one thing the opportunity to go do something they're not yet proven for is something I've done a lot," he said. "That's something that I wish more people did, the sort of experimentation, putting someone in the waters and letting them figure out how to swim. Rather than hiring the most well-known expert at that topic."
Perplexity made headlines earlier this year when news publications including The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, alleged that the AI startup was improperly using their content without sufficient attribution.
Srinivas told The Associated Press in June that Perplexity "never ripped off content from anybody" and that its AI-powered search engine, which aggregates material generated by other companies' AI models, "is not training on anyone else's content."
"We are actually more of an aggregator of information and providing it to the people with the right attribution," Srinivas said at the time.
He reiterated the startup's position in the interview at Stanford.
"What we are trying to say is we are trying our level best to summarize, synthesize from diverse sources, and make sure to give credit to all the original sources," he said.
"We are doing our best to make sure the credit attribution part is clear," Srinivas said.
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw. “We would not be […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Millions of Americans will pop open their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but tech companies are racing to turn the job of online shopping over to AI agents instead. Perplexity recently released an AI shopping agent for its paying customers in the United States. It’s supposed to navigate retail websites for you, find […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, wants to get into hardware — kinda sorta. Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s founder and CEO, posted on X on Monday that he was considering making a “simple, under $50” device to “reliably answer” questions “voice to voice.” He promised that Perplexity would “definitely” sell such a device if the post got […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. America’s AI war with China is intensifying — or at least, the rhetoric around it is. On Tuesday, a U.S. congressional commission proposed a “Manhattan Project-style” effort to fund the development of AI systems with human-level […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
