AI seek engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to boost round $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, in step with the Wall Side road Magazine.
If a deal occurs with the ones phrases, it will greater than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer season. The WSJ studies that the corporate recently receives about 15 million queries an afternoon and brings in round $50 million in annualized income.
Perplexity makes use of AI to lend a hand folks seek the internet in a chatbot-style interface. Some information publishers have accused the corporate of unauthorized internet scraping and plagiarism, and The New York Instances has even despatched Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, however CEO Aravind Srinivas mentioned he needs to paintings with publishers and has “little interest in being somebody’s antagonist right here.”
Those fundraising talks come after OpenAI introduced elevating a $6.6 billion spherical at a $157 billion valuation. Whilst merchandise like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the road between chatbot and seek engine, the corporate is shifting extra without delay into seek with SearchGPT.
Perplexity didn’t in an instant reply to a TechCrunch request for remark.