Funds for AI Search and Research Tool Perplexity

San Francisco-based conversational search firm Perplexity has raised $73.6m in a Series B round of funding, valuing it at around $520m. money will be used to expand operations and business reach.

The round, which brings the firm's total raised to date to around $100m, was led by IVP, joined by existing investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Databricks; and with new backers in tech firm Nvidia and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos' 'Expeditions Fund'.

The company was established in 2022 and boasts former DeepMind, Google and OpenAI intern and OpenAI research scientist Aravind Srinivas as CEO; plus former Facebook and Microsoft exec Denis Yarats as CTO.

Perplexity can be used for online search, with users choosing whether to use its in-house AI models or others including ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. If also offers an AI research assistant called Copilot, which provides custom follow-up questions for searchers, promising more relevant answers than either search engines or more complex research tools. Early adopters include many students, academics and knowledge execs.

The company is online at www.perplexity.ai .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.