Perplexity AI, a startup building search engine tools, has raised $73.6 million in a Series B funding round from a group of investors including Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN, ETR:AMZ) founder Jeff Bezos.
Other investors include Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates. The funding boosted Perplexity AI’s valuation to $520 million, according to reports.
Perplexity AI is developing search tools that do a better job than Alphabet’s Google and other platforms at delivering sources and citations along with its results. The company’s website saw 45 million visitors in December 2023, up dramatically from 2.2 million in December 2022.
The search engine operates like a chatbot, a medium that has surged in popularity thanks to the success of ChatGPT. In fact, Perplexity AI lets its users choose from a series of large language models, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, Google Gemini and its own Pro model.
“[Using multiple LLMs] removes the burden of prompt engineering and does not require users to ask perfectly phrased questions to get the answers they seek,” CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a blog post. “This enables users to gain more relevant and comprehensive answers than other AI chatbots, traditional search engines, or research tools.”