Report: Perplexity in Talks to Raise Up to $1 Billion

Perplexity AI is reportedly in early talks to raise $500 million to $1 billion in a funding round that would value it at $18 billion.

The details could change because the talks are at an early stage, Bloomberg reported Thursday (March 20).

The company currently has annually recurring revenue of nearly $100 million, according to the report.

Reached by PYMNTS, Perplexity declined to comment on the report.

The company was founded in 2022 and tripled its valuation twice in 2024, from $1 billion to $3 billion and then from $3 billion to $9 billion, per the Bloomberg report.

Perplexity is building an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine to compete with Google, and it offers paid and free versions of its search tool, the report said. It also offers a product that enables organizations to search their internal files.

The company’s AI search engine was serving over 100 million queries per week as of Oct. 25, CEO Aravind Srinivas said at the time in a post on X.

“Next stop: 100M+ queries every day,” he wrote in the post.

In early March, Perplexity began open sourcing a version of DeepSeek’s reasoning R1 model that is “unbiased, accurate” and has “factual information,” overcoming the original version’s refusal to respond to sensitive topics censored by the Chinese Communist Party.

The startup retrained DeepSeek’s R1 on a dataset of 300 topics known to be censored in China but with factual answers.

T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom said in early March that it is using technology from Perplexity to develop an “AI Phone” that would serve as a “virtual butler,” enabling users to simply talk to the phone to get it to do tasks, rather than switching between apps.

The Perplexity assistant will serve as the primary AI interface on the AI Phone, just like the way Siri runs systemwide in iPhones and Gemini is natively embedded in Google Pixel smartphones.

In February, Perplexity said in a post on X that it plans to launch its own web browser, dubbed “Comet,” and invited people to sign up on a waitlist.

A Perplexity spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time: “Just like Perplexity reinvented search, we’re also reinventing the browser. Stay tuned for updates.”