Perplexity CEO: Company Is Not Seeing Financial Strain

The CEO of artificial intelligence (AI) firm Perplexity says there’s no truth to speculation that his company is struggling.

Aravind Srinivas made this comment in a recent Reddit post — flagged Sunday (March 30) in a report by TechCrunch — aimed at reassuring users and answering their product complaints.

As the TechCrunch report noted, Srinivas seemed to be replying to a user theory that the AI search company  is “doing horribly financially” and “making lots of changes to cut costs.”

For instance, this theory cites Perplexity’s Auto mode, where the AI search engine automatically chooses the model with which to answer a user’s prompt.

But according to Srinivas, the company Perplexity developed Auto mode because “all AI products right now are shipping non-stop and adding a ton of buttons and dropdown menus and clutter,” which he argued is “not sustainable.”

“The user shouldn’t have to learn so much to use a product,” he said.

In terms of whether the company is under pressure to reduce costs or hold an initial public offering, he added that Perplexity has “all the funding we’ve raised, and our revenue is only growing,” and that they have “no plans of IPOing before 2028.”

The news comes amid a busy time for Perplexity, which recently announced its vision for the future of social media platform TikTok following weeks of reports that it hoped to merge with the ByteDance-owned company.

“Perplexity is singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly, combining world-class technical capabilities with Little Tech independence,” the company wrote on its blog earlier this month. “Any acquisition by a consortium of investors could in effect keep ByteDance in control of the algorithm, while any acquisition by a competitor would likely create a monopoly in the short form video and information space. All of society benefits when content feeds are liberated from the manipulations of foreign governments and globalist monopolists.”

Last week, the company announced a commerce-related partnership with firmly.ai, which — as PYMNTS wrote — will let Perplexity users browse and buy products without leaving the platform, “preserving consumer attention while streamlining the journey from inquiry to checkout.”

Taz Patel, Perplexity’s head of advertising, said the strategy hinges on following “user behavior traits” to serve the consumer at the appropriate moment in their buying journey.

“We’re seeing that the users are actually acting and engaging with the queries they’re putting into Perplexity,” he told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “Once we provide them the ability to actually shop in a quicker fashion, they’re doing it.”